Didier Kryn said on Wed, 1 Jan 2025 15:55:36 +0100

>Le 01/01/2025 à 06:44, Bruce Perens via Dng a écrit :
>> I never got to work with NeWS, but I had a NeXT Workstation at
>> Pixar. Very nice platform, not the aggulutinative mess that the Web
>> Browser ended up being. The closest thing to it today would be SVG,
>> but unfortunately SVG is also something of a mess because of its
>> relationship with HTML.
>
>     Why do you consider HTML a mess? I find it rather usefull.
>
>--     Didier

Hi Didier,

My answer to your question is: "Because most people don't use HTML5
like you and I do."

Before uploading an HTML file, I make sure that:

1. It's HTML5

2. It's well formed XML

3. It passes W3C validations with no errors or warnings

From talking with you in the past, I deduce you do the same.

#1 is obvious. It has the most useful features, and it allows (but
unfortunately doesn't require) end tags.

#2 is like using extra parentheses languages like C or in math
equations so you don't have to remember exact rules of precedence,
and the maintainers who follow you don't either. Those end tags
triple the likelihood that your HTML5 technically expresses what you
wanted it to. End tag use also gives you an excellent debugging
methodology that, if desired, I can reveal in a separate thread.

#3 is vital because most mainstream browsers render valid HTML5
correctly and reasonably uniformly. The so-called "trouble with
HTML" happens when all these fools upload (or manufacture on the
fly) invalid HTML, with undefined situations, and each browser is
left with the task of guessing what the author really meant.

So the real "trouble with HTML" is the same as Perl's problems: "Many
ways to do it". In the hands of an extremely competent practitioner,
"many ways to do it" might occasionally be convenient, but in practice,
with so many poser programmers, it just creates an unmaintainable mess.

In an ideal world, the web would have run on an XML dialect instead of
HTML. There were even attempts to retrofit XML (xhtml). The problem is
that HTML was invented first, and by the time XML came along, the genie
was long out of the bottle and to force XML on people would have broken
hundreds of thousands of websites. They tried to nudge all new
construction to xhtml, but it was too little too late. So now at least
HTML5 *allows* XML well formedness.

SteveT

Steve Litt

http://444domains.com