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> In practice, people won't write valid XML. We had a lot of cargo-culting, people putting self-closing tags into HTML, but people weren't using XML editors. T

> In practice, people won't write valid XML. We had a lot of cargo-culting, people putting self-closing tags into HTML, but people weren't using XML editors. That's probably the most popular argument against X(HT)ML and in favour of HTML5. In fact I think among the popular programming/markup languages, only very few are so forgiving. Namely it is HTML(5), JS, CSS and perhaps Shell script and Perl. But even in these cases following best-practices and using Linters has become extremely popular. On the other hand you have strongly typed languages or even languages like Python or Makefiles that even make sure you use consistent whitespaces. I think nearly everybody uses quite powerful editors with a load of plugins these days because accelerate editing and also do autoformatting. > Sites now really do work the same across browsers, and WHATWG deserves a lot of credit for that. On the other hand there are just 2 popular/"usable" browser engines left. I think XHTML is far more modular, maybe it would even be possible to outsource some browser rendering tasks to XSLT transformations. HTML at one point became a messy standard through the Browser competition and then WHATHG somehow manifested that situation I guess. Now there's a massive monoculture of Browser engines.

twsted 7y ago
> On the other hand there are just 2 popular/"usable" browser engines left. I count at least three
- jefftk 7y ago
  Yes: Gecko, Blink, Webkit, and EdgeHTMl. Edge is switching to Blink, and Blink is a fork of Webkit, but I'd say there are four now soon to be three.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    The way developers test Blink/Webkit still (they just test one browser in the family, be it Chrome or Safari largely depending on the web developer's home hardware) it's hard to consider it a hard enough fork to count as two separate engines. Sure, reality shows more divergence than such web developers that test that way tend to generally expect/believe (Safari as Apple-only "LTS" Chrome), but that perception and its reflection in testing alone seems reason to consider the family together (especially with Edge moving into the "family" for among other reasons that very reason of "simplifying web developer testing requirements").
jdeisenberg 7y ago
This is one of the things I liked so much about XML; you could have a single document and use XSLT to generate a web page or (via XSL-FO) a nicely-formatted print document.
bzbarsky 7y ago
The "HTML" parts are generally not the hard part of a browser engine, nowadays.

twsted 7y ago

> On the other hand there are just 2 popular/"usable" browser engines left. I count at least three

jefftk 7y ago
Yes: Gecko, Blink, Webkit, and EdgeHTMl. Edge is switching to Blink, and Blink is a fork of Webkit, but I'd say there are four now soon to be three.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  The way developers test Blink/Webkit still (they just test one browser in the family, be it Chrome or Safari largely depending on the web developer's home hardware) it's hard to consider it a hard enough fork to count as two separate engines. Sure, reality shows more divergence than such web developers that test that way tend to generally expect/believe (Safari as Apple-only "LTS" Chrome), but that perception and its reflection in testing alone seems reason to consider the family together (especially with Edge moving into the "family" for among other reasons that very reason of "simplifying web developer testing requirements").

jdeisenberg 7y ago

This is one of the things I liked so much about XML; you could have a single document and use XSLT to generate a web page or (via XSL-FO) a nicely-formatted print document.

bzbarsky 7y ago

The "HTML" parts are generally not the hard part of a browser engine, nowadays.