So would it be just as correct to use an electrical circuit as example, i.e. before Principia it was not believed possible to model an electrical circuit in a formal language?
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What about describing an electrical circuit formally? Surely this was thought possible before Principia was published.
> could you encode in pure logic how a dog behaves
Assuming we knew enough about how a dog behaves (or less ambitiously, a more primitive organism) I would assume this could be described in a formal language. But why would Principia be needed for this? Math have been used to model natural phenomena a long time before Principia.
I doubt you have any reliable statistics about this, given how many victims keep silent out of fear.
But in any case, the moral failure of the church was not the existence of individual abusers (which indeed can exist anywhere in society), but how on an institutional level known abusers were protected by the curch. Everyone who was part of the cover-up (which went all the way to the top) is complicit.
Language-level safety only protect against trivial mistakes like dereferencing a null-pointer. No language can protect against logical errors. If you have untrusted people comitting unvetted code, you will have much worse problems.
C# also supports null-safety, although less elegantly and as opt-in. If enabled, it won’t let you deference a possibly-null reference.
He states around minute 25 the solution to the problem is to explicitly represent null in the type system, so nullable pointers are explicitly declared as such. But it can be complex to ensure that non-nullable references are always initialized to a non-null value, which is why he chose the easy solution to just let every reference be nullable.
JSON is perhaps an accident of history rather than deliberately designed, but for structured data interchange it is better because it is simpler.
Just like XML, JSON os getting used outside of its area. Using JSON for configuration files is absurd, since it doesn’t allow comments.
Greenland has a parliament and manages its own domestic affairs. Denmark manages some domains like foreign and defense policy, but Greenland governs its own territory.
There are already a few cases, eg quirks mode vs standards mode and “use strict” mode, which was considered necessary for moving forward, but clearly it also complicates things for browsers. We dont want more modes than what is necessary.
Original SGML was actually closer to markdown. It had various options to shorten and simplify the syntax, making it easy to write and edit by hand, while still having an unambiguous structure.
The verbose and explicit structure of xhtml makes it easier to process by tools, but more tedious for humans.
Leaving out closing tags is possible when the parsing is unambigous. E.g <p>foo<p>bar is unambiguous becuse p elements does not nest, so they close automatically by the next p.
The question about invalid HTML is a sepearate issue. E.g you can’t nest a p inside an i according to the spec, so how does a browser render that? Or lexical error like illegal characters in a non-quoted attribute value.
This is where it gets tricky. Render anyway, skip the invalid html, or stop rendering with an error message? HTML did not specify what to do with invalid input, so either is legal. Browsers choose to go with the “render anyway” approach, but this lead to different outputs in different browsers, since it wasn’t agreed upon how to render invald html.
The difference between Netscape and IE was that Netscape in more cases would skip rendering invalid HTML, where IE would always render the content.
They dropped numbered versions. Now it is just HTML which is continuously evolved in a backwards-compatible manner.
> And if there will be an html6 why can't we just state "use version 5 in this document"
Because browser vendors are opposed to explicit versioning, since it introduces multiple rendering modes.