5 ms·

>>> if I can cope with HTML, I can cope with anything Just curious, what do you find so terrible about HTML?

• mhd 10y ago
  HTML's horrors are highly context sensitive. One of its most generic sins is the poor support for hypertext. Various predecessors did a better job at this (Hyper-G, HyTime). Anchor- and URI-based hyperlinks are a rather insufficient solution, and I think the web would've benefitted from a more extensive and extensible architecture. Speaking of extensible, HTML has the "class" attribute. Awesome. Something better would've spared us a lot of template languages in the first place. Not looking at you, XSLT. And when we deviate too much from both HTML's and its ancestor SGML's original purposes, the syntax gets really ugly. Explicit end tags make sense if the beginning of your document's <chapter> is more than a terminal's length out of sight, but when used in something you build UI elements out of (or where content isn't immediately there), the verbosity hurts. Never mind the general XML problem of sub-tags vs. attributes. At least the amount of different standards is getting better. Parsing still is way more complicated than it needs be. And let's not even start with the lateness and insufficiency of CSS. As bad as it was as a hypertext markup language, it's even worse as core structure for this weird NeWs-like quasi-PostScript we're squeezing HTML/CSS/JS into, for lack of a better alternative.