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Bzzzt! Imagine this: It is 1992-ish and you are writing an HTML page. The browser keeps rejecting your HTML without rendering it. You get a hot head, let out some steam and quit trying.
Bzzzt!
if a common person can't figure out how to type tags in pairs, and nest them properly, then they probably also have trouble wiping themselves after they shit.
muppet
The problem being if one browser accepts your dodgy HTML but others don't, you're in trouble.
Matt
Nope. That's not a problem either.
Bzzzt!
Average users will select browsers they perceive to "work better". That will be the most "accepting" one. Hence there will always be a bias towards acceptance rather than strictness.
sgf
The original poster's point is not mutually exclusive with the thing Joel quoted. I can conceive of both being true statements.
Tayssir John Gabbour
>> "Average users will select browsers they perceive to "work better". That will be the most "accepting" one. Hence there will always be a bias towards acceptance rather than strictness."
Bzzzt!
I write my HTML in a text editor CURRENTLY without errors, what was the problem in 1992?
muppet
I don't have a problem with the browser rejecting my HTML; I just want it to tell me why. Something like "Missing a </b> tag" rather than "Unspecified HTML syntax error."
Kyralessa
Well that's a brave statement muppet. How often do you run your perfect HTML through a validator and how often does it validate perfectly? Further more, how complex is it? As complexity increases so do errors.
Bzzzt!
+++ don't have a problem with the browser rejecting my HTML; I just want it to tell me why. Something like "Missing a </b> tag" rather than "Unspecified HTML syntax error." +++
muppet
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Ftest.madebymonkeys.net
muppet
The browser should have a special debugging mode where it would report errors like that. Obviously that type of error wouldn't be user friendly.
Bzzzt!
Browsers have to render HTML in any way they can simply because a browser is an end user tool. If a browser was an IDE then it would be different.
Bzzzt!
Muppet, read those messages. Things like "If you want to use a literal ampersand in your document you must encode it as "&" (even inside URLs!)." ought to give you the hint that it is your page that is wrong, not the W3C validator!
i like i
oh I read it, I just think it's freaking retarded to encode ampersands in URLs as &. What's the point? They're not intended to be viewed, they're obviously inside a tag attribute. Why is it 'standard' to type four unnecessary characters in every URL with a query string?
muppet
I have an alt in an <a> ? really?
muppet
s/b title=""
muppet
> anyway back OT, if browsers enforced strict HTML then there wouldn't be such a glut of unqualified "web developers" around.
muppet by another name, muppet all the same
ha
muppet
"anyway back OT, if browsers enforced strict HTML then there wouldn't be such a glut of unqualified "web developers" around."
you honestly think that it takes a university educated scientist to properly mark up HTML? Give me a break. You must congratulate yourself daily on your genius.
muppet
I disagree with the original poster.
Peter
"you honestly think that it takes a university educated scientist to properly mark up HTML? Give me a break. You must congratulate yourself daily on your genius."
Browsers have to be purposely "sloppy" (they really aren't sloppy) in their parsing of the HTML in order to accommodate the end user. HTML is purposely not a compiled, strictly typed language like C. It is simply a mark up language.
Bzzzt!
Remember that all HTML markup is just suggestions to the rendering engine; it can ignore all HTML and display plain text if it wants. From that perspective, Bzzzt has a good point; render what can be rendered, ignore the rest.
Tom H
"I don't have a problem with the browser rejecting my HTML; I just want it to tell me why. Something like "Missing a </b> tag" rather than "Unspecified HTML syntax error.""
Almost Anonymous
> what was the problem in 1992?
Alleck
Once again I would argue that XML compared to HTML is like comparing apples to oranges. HTML is a simple text markup language. XML is also a markup language but it's use is not the same as HTML.
Bzzzt!
Bzzt - you misunderstand. See my post just next to this on the list for an example of where one browser accepts bad HTML that other browsers don't, causing problems for the careless.
Matt
(I wasn't talking about missing closing tags)
Matt
"The XHTML is still valid and still very renderable. I'm not overly concerned with the uber-nitpickiness of the w3c. I still don't think browsers ought to render utterly foobared html, with missing end tags and the like."
E. Naeher
It's beyond me why browsers for the most part don't display an icon that indicates the correctness of the page. If a valid page was met with a smiley face and an invalid page with a frowny face, you would still get all the benefits of "loose" parsing but people would have a visible incentive to fix problems. Of course, clicking on the frowny face would reveal the exact error messages. I submit that if this had been standard practice in browsers since Day 1, we wouldn't have all these problems with invalid HTML.
Isaac Morland
E. Naeher -
muppet
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