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Comment by noxer | Hacker News Reader

You cant even find a website that passes html validation these days.

Validation has been unimportant for about 20 years. That has nothing to do with why websites are bad nowadays.

No one said its the reason, its just sign of how bad stuff is.

No it's not, validators are extremely outdated. It's not "bad" to forget to close the body tag, it actually doesn't matter at all.

"Validators are extremely outdated therefore not following HTML specification doesn't matter" :facepalm:

Accessibility?

I like valid HTML as much as the next guy and try to always write valid HTML myself, but it’s not the be-all-end-all: if Safari, Chrome and Firefox can parse your site 99% of users are happy. No end-user cares if you have charset set on a script that doesn’t have a src attribute, or that you’re technically not supposed to put style tags inside noscript tags.

The problem is that nobody can create anew browser engine because you not only need to implement all the standards you also need to make your browser work with broken html and work in the same way Chrome and Firefox work.

IMO we would need 2 split the document part from the application part. Have a set of elements and a document format just for blogs and news websites , and more complex components and APIs for application websites. Then you could have a browser that would be more simple that will be enough to browse blogs,forums and news sites and a more complex browser for SPA applications.

That first part is the Web, while the second part are native programs with Internet connection.

I think you could have web rich documents with basic interactivity and as an option web application that are "native app like" , with tons of APIs for camera/microphone , bluetooth, canvas, 3d , complex sound APIs.

We have to admit that rich web application can be very usefull, even during Java or Flash days we known that sometimes you need an animation or a simulation on a page to better present some content.

Though it makes you think if we had an 100% open source Flash, then you could have used it for complex SPA like Figma while keeping all the bloat into an optional plugin , if the plugin was optional developers would not be tempted to use it unless is needed and it it was needed they would have use something like Flex (a Flash GUI tookit) and not reinvent the wheel constantly.

Sure, canvas is appropriate for basic animations/simulations.

I know that its not functionally required but after who knows haw many years of "html isn't written by humans" why is it still not following the rules. I get that humans make errors, I get that they are lazy and dont add alt text and all that stuff. But software that exists to generate html should clearly generate valid html.

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