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Comment by possibilistic | Hacker News Reader

You hit the nail on the head.

HTML5 got one thing right though: standardization of the DOM failure behavior. As an implementation detail of their design, they went with "sensible recovery" for failures over stricter failure modes.

In going with the WHATWG over the W3C, we ultimately chose "easy to author, (slow to evolve) living standard" over "strictly typed yet developer extensible". I was disappointed, but it's good for some parties I suppose. (It certainly keeps the browser vendors in charge of the core tech...)

The W3C over-engineered to a fault. They had a lot of the right ideas, but were too enamored by XML and RDF.

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It wasn't really a choice in favor of "easier to author." It was a choice in favor of "will this actually get implemented, or just be fancy theorycraft?"

No browser vendor was going to ship new features only in XML parsing mode, because that was author-hostile enough that it would lose them authors, and thus users. (Browser game theory.) The choice of HTML over XML syntax was purely practical, in this sense.

HTML5 got one thing right though: standardization of the DOM failure behavior. As an implementation detail of their design, they went with "sensible recovery" for failures over stricter failure modes.

It was browsers that did that in the first place. HTML5 just standardized the exact behavior on failures.

Which is what I said, right?

HTML 4 - vendors implemented the spec incongruently and failed in their own special ways. XHTML strict - standard parsing rules with strict failure mode. HTML 5 - standard parsing rules, suggested (but not required) rendering behavior for browser uniformity, and well-defined failure behavior.

Incorrect. HTML5 synthesized the exact behavior that was closest to the majority of browsers. But not all browsers agreed (e.g. Mozilla would change its HTML parsing behavior depending on network packet boundaries), so there was still effort aligning with the newly-specced common parsing algorithm. At the time there was much skepticism that such alignment was even possible.

> Mozilla would change its HTML parsing behavior depending on network packet boundaries

I want to know more...

Some links:

https://blog.mozilla.org/mrbkap/2013/08/12/the-old-html-pars...

http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1138169545&count=1

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324875

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