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Unpopular opinion: I like XML, and I liked self-closing tags as well. It made more sense. The problem with being lax in what you accept is that it builds immen
by bambax 5y ago
Unpopular opinion: I like XML, and I liked self-closing tags as well. It made more sense.
The problem with being lax in what you accept is that it builds immense complexity because you have to deal with a potentially infinite number of special cases.
But this books appears excellent. I read the encoding chapter just now, and it was very engaging and informative, explaining the historical reasons why things are the way they are.
For example, it says that meta tag about character encoding were initially meant to be read by the server so that it could set the proper encoding header... Which they never did... I did not know that!
- heavenlyblue 5y agoHow can a server read a tag if it doesn’t know which encoding to interpret the tag in the first place?
- bambax 5y agoI'm guessing, like the HTML parser does: by doing a "pre-parse". The pre-parser is yet another HTML parser, specialized on this task. This is well described in the book and this is how browsers do it today. It seems no web server ever implemented it; it would probably have been a little beneficial because each file would only need to be pre-parsed when it is written on disk (or first read by the server), instead of this being done by every client on every load. It makes me think, maybe other kinds of analysis and normalization could be done by the server, which would allow for simpler (and stricter) browsers.
- IshKebab 5y agoI'm not following what your unpopular opinion is. I think everyone would have preferred it if XHTML had been a success.