4 ms·

Another aspect is that so much of the web these days is JS and CSS, with HTML being a bunch of div tags that the former two latch on to.

hilbert42 9y ago
You're absolutely right of course. Even without JS, it's hard to think of a system that could be messier and more convoluted than the way we now mark up web pages. Not that this problem is unique to web pages, desktop publishing and wordprocessors still have and have always had similar issues (similarly the lack of coherent rules for cutting-&-pasting between pages generated by different means—i.e.: the ongoing matter of formatting distortions, etc. after pasting). This has always seemed strange to me as you'd think that replacing handwriting onto paper with a systematic standardised format/methodology for displaying writing etc. onto computer screens/printers would have been considered one of the most basic and fundamental tasks for computer solution but unfortunately it's never been so. Consider the following still-unsolved problem of writing (or annotating) between the lines or in the margins of computer-generated text. Right, it's dead easy to do if one wants to scribble by hand in the margins of a book or on a sheet of paper, etc. but it's nigh on impossible to do it electronically. (Given that we've now had electronic computers for some 70 or so years since WWII, this, I reckon, is very strange indeed.) ___ Incidentally, I consider JavaScript an abomination (at least in web pages). By default, JS is turned off on my browser and I only turn it on when strictly necessary, which in practice is about 3% of web sites I visit. Moreover, sites that require its use up front or refuse to display the primary/home page without it are clicked-off as fast as my mouse-clicking reaction time is (there's always a plethora of similar sites without such issues). This way, I avoid the most egregious of the junk that often appears on web pages and my browsing is very significantly faster (not to mention much more satisfying).

hilbert42 9y ago

You're absolutely right of course. Even without JS, it's hard to think of a system that could be messier and more convoluted than the way we now mark up web pages. Not that this problem is unique to web pages, desktop publishing and wordprocessors still have and have always had similar issues (similarly the lack of coherent rules for cutting-&-pasting between pages generated by different means—i.e.: the ongoing matter of formatting distortions, etc. after pasting). This has always seemed strange to me as you'd think that replacing handwriting onto paper with a systematic standardised format/methodology for displaying writing etc. onto computer screens/printers would have been considered one of the most basic and fundamental tasks for computer solution but unfortunately it's never been so. Consider the following still-unsolved problem of writing (or annotating) between the lines or in the margins of computer-generated text. Right, it's dead easy to do if one wants to scribble by hand in the margins of a book or on a sheet of paper, etc. but it's nigh on impossible to do it electronically. (Given that we've now had electronic computers for some 70 or so years since WWII, this, I reckon, is very strange indeed.) ___ Incidentally, I consider JavaScript an abomination (at least in web pages). By default, JS is turned off on my browser and I only turn it on when strictly necessary, which in practice is about 3% of web sites I visit. Moreover, sites that require its use up front or refuse to display the primary/home page without it are clicked-off as fast as my mouse-clicking reaction time is (there's always a plethora of similar sites without such issues). This way, I avoid the most egregious of the junk that often appears on web pages and my browsing is very significantly faster (not to mention much more satisfying).