Hacker News Reader

> Although technically invalid, it still renders fine in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.

When I learned HTML the syntax was sooo particular.

Now (our pretty much since then) anything goes and I love it

Natural evolution of protocols

No. It goes only because there are very few browser engines, who mostly can align their behaviour with each other.

Protocols with miltiple implementations are way more strict, because you can't feasibly test your quirky approach on every implementation, and the chance they will all be as forgiving is slim.

HTML parsing is well-specced these days.

The parsing is easy. And done in many, many libraries outside of the browsers. (And no, parsing with regex is still not possible, zalgo)

The problem is not parsing of HTML, its the DOM events, CSS application, javascript apis and above all the combination thereof which must be rendered all exactly the same, what makes it hard.

parsing was never so much the problem as what was rendered afterwards being different.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com