HTML Optional Tags
html.spec.whatwg.org
html.spec.whatwg.org
- a browser must reject any invalid HTML in order to force the developers to fix their HTML
- a browser must try hard to make sense of messed up HTML, otherwise users will switch to a competing browser that renders the mess for them
What is the end result? Nothing for the end user, they do not care whether the browser has to deal with nice HTML or a mess. Developer writing HTML get to be more sloppy at the price of a lot of additional complexity and pain where ever code has to deal with HTML. This might actually have some negative impact on end users because of bugs or security issues stemming from the additional complexity. Maybe it made HTML somewhat more accessible to the casual user as they could get away with some mistakes. But was this worth it, could better tooling not have achieved the same with good error messages helping to fix errors?
> Some authors find it helpful to be in the practice of always quoting all attributes and always including all optional tags, preferring the consistency derived from such custom over the minor benefits of terseness afforded by making use of the flexibility of the HTML syntax. To aid such authors, conformance checkers can provide modes of operation wherein such conventions are enforced.
In the other words it recognizes the benefit from explicit tags, but also recognizes the benefit from optional tags. So they are equally conforming.
At the end of the day, HTML's flexibility as a markup language is what made it popular and usable by anyone, and ambiguity is the price we pay for it.
These days the DOM semantics are even less important as everything is done in JS anyway for all but the simplest documents
(START div)Hello (START b)world\b/!\div/
But despite all the flexibility offered by SGML and because probably nobody implemented HTML parsing by using a SGML parser, we ended up with malformed HTML documents who's interpretation was essentially defined by whatever the ad hoc HTML parser implementations in browser did.
HTML5 finally abandoned the idea of basing HTML on SGML and a DTD and instead essentially formalized the status quo of HTML parsing and put it into the specification. At least this is my understanding as a non-web developer who gets to work with HTML only occasionally.
The W3C was too strict where it didn't really matter (the basic markup) and too loose where it did matter (everything else).
Also there was no specification right from the start and the feature set was very limited, so that everyone started implementing their interpretation of HTML and adding their extensions. Trying to combine and standardize all the things existing in the wild would necessarily be a hard task. Many early extensions were probably also quite ad hoc and even if not they most likely did not take into account interactions with extensions from others.
But in the end this could probably never have happened much differently, future developments and requirements could not be known in any detail and even if nobody would ever have spent a decade to write good specifications for a new technology which might or might not get adopted.
The things that did try to design for the future, across platforms, failed. Java on the desktop, WPF, etc. all gave way to the simplicity of web technologies.
Developers?
In the early days of the web it wasn't developers writing HTML. It was anybody who wanted to publish anything on the web. Real programmers didn't touch it. That is why browsers had to be tolerant of bad code.
Exactly. The parser is designed to parse documents, not code. The document has a structure (like sections, paragraphs, tables, etc). When the structure doesn’t quite make sense, the parser still displays the content (the blog, story, words, etc).
> But was this worth it, could better tooling not have achieved the same with good error messages helping to fix errors?
You need to think about compatibility, especially backwards compatibility. If the standard was so strict that any error resulted in the browser rejecting to parse the document, then as the specification evolved every website would need to be updated. The lack of constraints around standards also means that different browsers can evolve and implement different features at different cadences.
<ahahah>mmm... <ohoho>nope.</ahaha></ohoho>
edit: apparently it has the cute name of "the adoption agency algorithm":
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/parsing.html#adoption...
> Note: This algorithm's name, the "adoption agency algorithm", comes from the way it causes elements to change parents, and is in contrast with other possible algorithms for dealing with misnested content.
I use optional -- therefore abbreviated -- HTML syntax as an alternative to MarkDown for writing.
We need to go deeper. •`_´•
1. No translation of markdown to HTML is required to turn it into a web-page, the medium I primarily work in. It's not required -- I can read nicely formatted raw HTML just fine.
2. Lower cognitive load. Damn if I can remember if a link in markdown is ()[] or []() or the link goes first or the link goes last. But a link in HTML is consistent with the rest of the language.
3. HTML is richer than Markdown. I make heavy use of <abbr> and <cite> and <time>, not to mention metadata tags. My position is if you need to include HTML in Markdown to express yourself, you might as well write in HTML instead of construct some hybrid bastard document.
I agree. I just don't think it's very useful to omit close tags. Any decent editor will maintain them for you.
Now that HTML5 parsing is well specified, I've come to think that either you want to be strict and have the browser tell you something is wrong, and you use XHTML for this, or all these optional tags are just useless.
I want to optimize readability, and then file size. I believe closing all tags you opened and quoting all attributes helps readability, and also that all these <head>, <body>, <html> tags just get in the way and make your eyes go through useless boilerplate and makes your fingers type useless things too if you don't use templates.
You still need to specify the charset so characters are interpreted correctly, so for me, if you are not going to use application/html+xml anyway this works well:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<title> My title </title>
<p> Lorem ipsum... </p>
Though just yesterday I edited my resume written in XHTML and the browser actually spotted a dumb mistake, so I still like the strictness of the XML parsing mode.
One counterpoint to dropping the optional tags is for pedagogy: if I had to teach HTML to someone, I would make them use all the tags, or the result of having html and body in the DOM and CSS working on them will be very confusing. Only when they understand the DOM, what nodes are in an HTML page, I'd make them drop the tags if they want. Which is an important step so they can understand that nodes that are present in the DOM are not necessarily in the source code.
I believe it can be put on any element, but if you are adding a tag just for this, it might as well be <html>.
For example emitters need to know what void elements are because <br></br> is actually equivalent to`<br><br>`. But `<script src=foo.js/>` is only an opening tag so the rest of your document will be executed as JavaScript. So you can't just write an emitter for arbitrary elements, you need to emit different things for `br` and `script`. Plus `script` has special escaping rules that are often forgotten about. Plus you better keep that list up to date!
With XHTML it is very easy to write a parser that will construct a tree forever and can reserialize it with no issues. I have no issues with consistent changes such as empty attributes and unquoted attribute values, but I think that these element insertion, auto-closing, void elements and non-replaceable character data are a mistake because you need to maintain an up-to-date dataset of these custom rules or you get an incorrect result.
(Is still a thing, but W3C recommends against it)