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Comment by lifthrasiir | Hacker News Reader

It is a formal specification of what browsers used to do with a broken HTML. Because it is now fully specified, everyone can safely write a broken HTML (half joking!), but also there is no longer a surprising behavior due to diverging behaviors from different browsers.

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Good... now let's make a formal specification for this:

    <ahahah>mmm... <ohoho>nope.</ahaha></ohoho>

Fully joking :-P

I believe whatwg did in fact specify for this kind of overlapping tag.

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.

At least the people who named it understood the silliness of the issue, heh.

It is not as silly as it sounds. Many programming language implementations allow a partial parser that looks similar to this in order to give better diagnostics even when the AST is incomplete. (I did the same in the past, for example.)

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