2005 • February • 25

Too lazy to think of a quick title

Markdown just pleasantly surprised me by letting me write several paragraphs in the a bullet point by guessing how I should work the text, without me even checking the syntax page. Nice.

I wonder sometimes what the web would have been like if, in the beginning, web browsers had been hard-asses about HTML standards compliance? I mean, I can't get away with writing half-malformed Java or C++ code--who thought it was a good idea to be so forgiving with HTML?
Then again, there's always Postel's Law: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." And people would have probably stopped cobbling together their first home pages after the second or third parser error that brought their fun to a screeching halt.

Stuart Langridge

2005-02-25T07:01:12

_I wonder sometimes what the web would have been like if, in the beginning, web browsers had been hard-asses about HTML standards compliance? I mean, I can't get away with writing half-malformed Java or C++ code; who thought it was a good idea to be so forgiving with HTML?_ People who wanted the web to work, really. :) Mark Pilgrim wrote loads about the draconian parsing in XML ( http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/16/draconianism ) and noted that everyone apart from Tim Bray wanted lax parsing like HTML has...if browsers had been the same, loads of HTML pages wouldn't validate, just like loads of XML pages don't validate today, but all the invalid ones _wouldn't display in a browser_.