Hacker News Reader

Comment by juanpablo | Hacker News Reader

"For an invalid XML document, browsers did not even make an attempt to parse the document as best they could, as they would with HTML—instead, they just displayed a validation error and stopped".

Yes that is the idea: Force developers to write valid code.

View on HN

That would be an excellent idea if browsers actually stuck to standards and didn't have any bugs. Unfortunately that will never happen, so developers are forced to write invalid code.

Also XHTML doesn't allow tons of useful things.

How are these things connected? I don't know of any browser bugs where the workaround includes writing non-well formed code.

And what useful things does XHTML not allow (which HTML allow)?

In HTML, the noscript element may be used. In XHTML, it is forbidden.

document.write() and document.writeln() cannot be used in XHTML, they can in HTML.

In XHTML, the use of the innerHTML property requires that the string be a well-formed fragment of XML.

Also as far as I remember there are odd things with iframes etc.

Also the fact that HTML: <input type=checkbox checked>

becomes <input type="checkbox" checked="checked"/>

can add quite a bit of unnecessary bloat to a page.

Why force them?

the alternative is that people become reliant, then, on the implementations guess as to what the person meant. in order to still call such a thing a standard, you'd also have to standardize the guesswork involved in correcting people's mistakes. this would lead to a very large and cumbersome "standard" that violates principals of minimalism and least power. that being said, you can bet your bottom dollar that programs like "tidy" are really useful sometimes =D

isnt all this chaos with interoperable, semi-compatible enough for you???

Reply on news.ycombinator.com