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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that you are collapsing two users with very different needs into a single one.

1. If you are authoring an XHTML file, yes, you want the renderer to be as picky as possible and yell loud and clear if you make a mistake. This helps you produce a valid, well-formed document.

2. If you are an end user reading an XHTML file, it's not your file, it's not your fault if there are bugs, and there's jack shit you can do to fix it. You just want the browser to do its best to show you something reasonable so you can read the page and get on with your life.

XHTML optimizes for 1 at the expense of 2. HTML5 optimizes for 2 at the expense of 1.

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For some reason generating a valid wire format seems to be no problem for people when it comes to json. Forgot to escape a quote? Woops, that’s on me, should have used a serializer.

But add a few angled braces in there and lord have-a mercy, ain’t nobody can understand this ampersand mumbo jumbo, I wanna hand write my documents and generate wutever, yous better jus deal with it gosh dangit.

I prefer the current situation too but I still think it’s funny somehow we just never bought into serializers for html. Maybe the idea was before its time? I’m sure you’d have no such parsing problems in the wild if you introduced JTML now. Clearly people know how to serialize.

> For some reason generating a valid wire format seems to be no problem for people when it comes to json.

The "some reason" is that JSON is most often produced by code, written by programmers.

That's not the case for HTML which is often hand-authored directly by non-programmer users. Most people on Earth literally don't know what the word "syntax" means, much less feel comfortable dealing with syntax errors in text files.

"Most people on Earth" can't write HTML. And if one doesn't know what the word "syntax" means, they are not going to have much success writing HTML - after all, ignoring the errors does not make them go away.

Instead, it seems your choices are either:

(1) errors cause random changes on page, such as text squishing into small box, or whole paragraphs missing, or random words appearing on page, or style being applied to wrong text etc...

(2) errors cause page to fail loading with no text shown at all

Both of those are pretty bad, but I wish web would go with (2) instead of (1). Because in that case, we'd have whole ecosystem of tooling appear... Imagine "auto fixup" feature in web servers which "fixes up" bad HTML into good one. For basic users, it looks the same as today. But instead of fixup and guesswork being done by users' browsers (which author has no control of) it would be done by author's webhosts (which author can upgrade or not upgrade as needed...)

You are vastly underestimating how much of the web was and is successfully authored by non-technical people who barely understand the difference between a word processor and a text editor but are able to cobble together enough HTML tags that it mostly looks like they want and lets them share their knowledge with the rest of the world.

> 2. If you are an end user reading an XHTML file, it's not your file, it's not your fault if there are bugs, and there's jack shit you can do to fix it. You just want the browser to do its best to show you something reasonable so you can read the page and get on with your life.

Here's the thing though, if all XHTML clients are strict about it then that means the content is broken for EVERYONE which presumably means it gets noticed pretty quickly as long as the site is being maintained by anyone.

Compare that to HTML where if a page is doing something wrong but in a way that happens to work in Webkit/Blink while it barfs all over the place in Gecko it could go ignored for ages. Those of us who are old enough remember an era where a huge number of web sites only targeted Trident and didn't care in the slightest whether it worked in any other engine.

There has to be an opposite to Postel's Law that acknowledges it's better in some cases to ensure that breakage for anybody becomes breakage for everybody because that means the breakage can't be ignored.

If authored files had to be valid in order to work, how would the author have sold you an invalid file in the first place? They would have seen that it didn’t work when they were making it, and fixed it. If they’d sold you a book that didn’t open, you’d be entitled to a refund.

There is an evolutionary counter-argument here.

Imagine two file formats competing to be "the web":

* In file format A, the syntax is narrowly specified and any irregularity causes it to be not rendered at all.

* In file format B, there are many ways to express the same thing and many syntactic forms are optional and can be omitted while leaving a page that still renders.

Now imagine millions of non-technical users are trying to make websites. They randomly pick A or B. Which ones do you think are more likely to get to a point where they have a page that renders that they can put online? It's B.

Even though the file format of B offends our software engineer sensibilities, in an evolutionary sense it is much more robust and able to thrive because more fallible users are able to successfully write working files using it. It will completely dominate once network effects get involved.

1. ensures that 2. doesn't happen. Not doing 1. pretty much gurantees that 2. will happen.

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