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The web standards were also much simpler then. It was difficult but tractable for a small team of volunteers to implement and keep up with them. That ship has
by ori_b 7y ago
The web standards were also much simpler then. It was difficult but tractable for a small team of volunteers to implement and keep up with them.
That ship has sailed.
- dredmorbius 7y agoStandards often shift be a substantial reconsolidation, in which numerous side features are discarded. HTML itself emerged from such a consolidation (from SGML) and went through this process a few times. There are numerous other examples of technical recapitulation.
- ori_b 7y agoHTML and the menagerie of related standards has never, as far as I'm aware, become simpler. And the old versions have never been removed from a browser.
- dredmorbius 7y agoXHTML was a step too far. It was rejected in favour of HTML4 & 5, ultimately.
- ori_b 7y agoxhtml seems to me quite a bit simpler to implement than HTML5.
- dredmorbius 7y agoXHTML is hard-structured, and among its negatives, requires being fully downloaded to be parsed and validated. HTML, including H5, has soft-fail modes. At least that's the justification I generally see. See the Criticism section of the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML#Criticism
- ori_b 7y agoThat makes HTML5 harder to implement, not simpler.
- dredmorbius 7y agoHTML5 != XHTML. (If that's what you're saying.) HTML5 breaks soft. It's easier to write, which is what drives content. A parser for which there is no content becomes moot. (I'd prefer far more rigorous document specification. That's not the Universe I inhabit.)
- ori_b 7y agoYou're responding to a thread pointing out that browsers are too complicated to implement, which has forced everyone but Google and Mozilla to give up on providing browsers and web standards. And Google is currently the funding source for Mozilla, giving them a more or less complete monopoly on the future of the web.