3 ms·

Sounds like the complains are targetted at faulty implementations, not the document standard.

• dragonwriter 7y ago
  Yes, that the standard wasn't designed with the people actually implementing browsers and as a result was unusable for content in the real world whatever advantages it had in the theoretical world where it was widely and correctly implemented was a major problem. Hence the “ivory tower” comment upthread.
  • geezerjay 7y ago
    The expression "ivory tower" has an entirely different meaning. Just because the couple of dominant players chose to ignore a standard, particularly in a time and age where they were outright hostile to interoperability initiatives, it doesn't mean the standard was not reasonable.
• cygx 7y ago
  What good is a standard you can't use in practice? There also were other issues: XHTML was chasing the dream of the semantic, well-formed, machine-readable web, but it didn't do enough to help with pragmatic problems web designers trying to deliver a product actually faced. As much as I like the idea myself from a theoretical perspective, the market had other priorities.
  • thaumasiotes 7y ago
    I don't think the idea works from a theoretical perspective. The browser is a communication channel between a publisher and a reader. They may want different things... But the "semantic, well-formed, machine-readable web" idea is, in theory, a demand that the channel imposes on both parties. It's not something the publisher wants. It's not something the reader wants. Nobody cares what the channel wants; demanding extra information that isn't relevant to what any party to an actual transaction is trying to accomplish is always going to be doomed. Readers care about positional information at a fairly minor level. Publishers care about it a lot. And hey, positional information has robust, if annoying, implementations.