8 ms·

The web runs on tolerance

101 points by speckx 1y ago

sylware 1y ago
There are 2 webs. web apps and web sites. web apps require a [java|ecma]script whatng cartel web engine, more and more only the gogol one (blink) will "correctly" work (abuse of dominant position). web sites are noscript/basic (x)html ("forms" and the <audio> <video> elements). Usually a "semantic" 2D table with proper ids for navigation.
ktpsns 1y ago
The older ones among us remember when XML took over the world and everyone was supposed to use strict XHTML. It turned out that the strength of the HTML ecosystem was its fault tolerance. HTML4 was the "sloppy" answer to XHTML. It brought HTML back from a data language to a markup language. Every Markdown parser is similarly fault-tolerant as HTML parsers. However, CSS and JS are not error-tolerant. A syntax error in a CSS rule causes it to be ignored. An unhandled JavaScript exception is a hard stop. This way, web does not run on tolerance.
- MangoToupe 11mo ago
 > It turned out that the strength of the HTML ecosystem was its fault tolerance. I don't think this was a "strength" of html so much as a necessity to not break the internet. I certainly preferred the formal nature of xhtml to html 5. But, we're stuck with needing to render obviously formally-broken documents.
 - wredcoll 11mo ago
 So it's not a strength it's a necessity? I'm not sure these words mean what you think they do...
 - MangoToupe 11mo ago
 Yes, I would describe this as a liability. It costs more to implement basic html interpretation with zero benefit
 - rerdavies 11mo ago
 The benefit accrues to developers, who get more consistent behavior across browsers. In the bad old days, errors that one browser might silently recover from would trigger unspecified recover behavior on other browsers that wasn't consistent.
- sebular 11mo ago
 Nonsense. Open the console on l any mediocre webpage and you’ll see a stream of JavaScript errors. But it’s still working. One script crashes? Doesn’t matter to any other script. Unhandled exception? Rest of the app is still working fine. Hell, that button may work if you just click it again. And CSS syntax error causing only that single line of code to be ignored while every other line of code works fine is the very definition of fault tolerance. What else could you possibly want?
 - trimethylpurine 11mo ago
 All that is very good. But as a back end guy dabbling in front end, it would be more welcoming if JS was a little intuitive. I'm very thankful for LLMs now helping with that a bit, but honestly even they seem to fail at JS more so than other languages, at least in my experience so far.
 - auxiliarymoose 11mo ago
 Much of the challenge in JS today is due to unnecessary packages, build systems, and workarounds found throughout blogs and forums which were reasonable 5-10 years ago but aren't really needed today. Unfortunately, LLMs tend to output old-fashioned JS. With (almost) everyone using an up-to-date standards-compliant browser, you can sidestep most of the complexity and weirdness by just using the standard library and ES Modules (instead of frameworks, libraries, build systems etc.) and an IDE with good intellisense + inline documentation lookup. MDN documentation is good and up to date overall, but I'm not sure there is a good overview/entry point resource that is up to date as of today... maybe I'll have to write it!
 - socalgal2 11mo ago
 I don't know if my experience is any guide but for me, coming from C++, I hated JS (~2008 is when my job required it). I kept trying to use it as C++. Over time I learned to love it. I stopped trying to make it C++ (or Java/C#, etc...) and actually embraced it. Now the tables have turned (to some degree). I can write programs in JS in 1-3 days that take weeks or months in C++/C#/Java Some of this comes from the browser environment. I get portable 2d/3d/gpu graphics, portable audio, image loading, video playback, and complex text rendering and layout, portably and for free. Back in C++/C# land, every new project is a chore of setup and fighting with linkers and build options etc. I post some code in a github repo with github pages on, or in some JS playground like codepen, and instantly share it with all friends regardless of platform. Another comes from the language itself. I can often generically wrap existing APIs in a few lines of codes, things that used to take days and/or large program refactors to do in C/C++. And, the tools are pretty good, Chrome DevTools are as good or better than my experience in C/C++. Right now, when I try to debug in C++ in XCode, std::string shows nothing and containers are inscrutable. I'm sure that's fixable. The point is, I shouldn't have to fix basic stuff. Now of course I'm using TypeScript for some projects and the types help but I'm often glad for the escape hatch for more generic code. It takes me 15 mins to write some generic system in JS and then 2-4hrs to figure out how to get TypeScript happy to type it. As an example, a function that creates a new TypedArray of the same type as some src array. Easy to write in JS. Harder to type in TS. That's effectively part of the same issues I have in C++, the part that stalls progress, that I don't have the escape hatch for generic solutions. PS: Yes, it's not that hard to type a generic TypedArray function in TS. But it's certainly a learning curve, or was before LLMs, and I've had to type much more complex functions that required no typing in JS
- re 11mo ago
 > HTML4 was the "sloppy" answer to XHTML I think you mean HTML5, which exhaustively specified how to do parsing in a fault-tolerant, normalizing way. HTML 4 (and 4.01) predated XHTML 1.0, and HTML 4.01 attempted to take things in a stricter direction, introducing a "Strict" DTD that did things like drop the tag, in pursuit of separating structure and presentation.
- verandaguy 11mo ago
 Funny enough my impression of JS (the kind you'd write in 2007 more than the type you see now, mind you) is that it's remarkably tolerant; many idioms and operations which would cause, in other languages, runtime errors or compile errors, would just get steamrolled over in JS because of just how much built-in flexibility the uber-weak type system (plus liberal use of the prototype pattern in the stdlib) allows for. - Wanna subtract a string from a number? That's not a type error, that's a `NaN` -- which is just a perfectly-valid IEEE 754 float, after all, and we all float down here. - Hell -- arithmetic between arbitrary data types? Chances are you get `[object Object]` (either as a string literal or an *actual* object), which you can still operate on. - Accessing an object field but you typoed the field name? No worries, that's just `undefined`, and you can always operate on `undefined` values. Frankly, while I haven't had a frontend focus in about 15 years, I struggle to think of any situation where calling a stdlib function or standard language feature would result in an actual exception rather than just an off behaviour that'll accumulate over time the more of them you stack on eachother. I guess calling an undefined variable is a ReferenceError, but beyond that... (This comment shouldn't be taken as an endorsement of this school of language design)
 - auxiliarymoose 11mo ago
 It is also (nearly) impossible to completely crash a web page. There isn't a main loop that can panic out. No matter where an exception gets thrown, the overall application keeps going and responding to events. Can't access a network resource? API returns an unexpected error? Library crashes? Browser extension breaks something? Doesn't matter. The user can still view and scroll the page, and the rest of it will probably keep working, too.
 - franga2000 11mo ago
 Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information). The amount of articles on HN that render perfectly, then vanish a second later and are replaced by this error message is insane. Yes, I'm using an old unmaintained Android HN reader with a questionable webview. No, that's not an excuse to delete a perfectly rendered from right in front of my eyes.
- chrismorgan 11mo ago
 > CSS [is] not error-tolerant. A syntax error in a CSS rule causes it to be ignored. That is error-tolerant, in basically the same way HTML is. > An unhandled JavaScript exception is a hard stop. A more appropriate example here is that a JS syntax error stops the entire script from running. That’s the XML parser approach.
- account42 11mo ago
 > However, CSS and JS are not error-tolerant. A syntax error in a CSS rule causes it to be ignored. This is good though as it provides a means for progressive enhancement using new features only when they are available and falling back on previous rules if they are not. It's very different from the syntax error -> RIP page nonsense of XHTML.
 - zamadatix 11mo ago
 In the CSS half, in the JS half it's really no different. Of course that's fine because "best effort logic" doesn't provide nearly as much value as "best effort layout".
blitz_skull 11mo ago
Who, exactly, is this guy angry at?
Mathnerd314 11mo ago
But in contrast, web communities run on moderation, i.e. a sort of intolerance of bad content. The lesson is that technical issues and social issues really don't mix. You can't conclude anything from one versus the other. Case in point, cryptocurrency was supposed to be the anarchist's dream, but now it's being adopted by some central banks.
- StilesCrisis 11mo ago
  Moderation isn't used for filtering out the most tolerant individuals. (Look up the paradox of tolerance sometime.)
- tclancy 11mo ago
  > technical issues and social issues really don't mix I don’t think that’s true in the least. I think it’s true there are no technical solutions to social problems, but any and all technology comes from people forming societies and seeking solutions. This comment feels the same as people saying “Stick to sports” about athletes talking politics. Everything is political. If you don’t think something is, it tends to be because one is insulated from the politics that affect it.
  - bluefirebrand 11mo ago
    > Everything is political This is such a tedious worldview Maybe everything is political, but it doesn't have to be that way
    - edent 11mo ago
      "there are only: Two races: white and "political" Two genders: Male and "political" Two hair styles for women: long and "political" Two sexualities: straight and "political" Two body types: normative and "political" https://twitter.com/emmahvossen/status/1138841342921060354?lang=en https://twitter.com/emmahvossen/status/1138841342921060354?l...
    - lambertsimnel 11mo ago
      I wonder whether people who disagree about this are talking at crossed purposes. I think there's politics in a narrower sense (concerning partisanship and state intervention) and politics in a wider sense (concerning power relations and decision making). To depoliticise things in the former sense (by depolarising and deregulating) isn't to depoliticise them at all in the latter sense. In society, arguably everything is economic, legal, psychological, etc. Presumably, what people mean when they say "everything is political" is that politics in the wider sense is both important and on this list.
didgetmaster 11mo ago
This guy lost me when he started talking about diversity issues instead of tech. I couldn't care less about the race, gender, or sexual orientation of the person(s) who created the hardware or software that I use. Does it work? Is it easy to understand and use? These are the things I am interested in. I am reminded of an early cartoon of a dog sitting at a computer saying 'On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog!'
- tclancy 11mo ago
  Two paths diverged in a wood. You took one and the Whole Point took the other here.
- fwip 11mo ago
  Do you care, then, that people are driving away contributors specifically because of their race/gender/orientation? Because without them, we wouldn't have [the stuff in the article].
- stingraycharles 11mo ago
  Yeah I think it’s quite a leap to go from “html is successful because it’s fault tolerant” to “this applies to communities as well”. There’s obviously a case to be made for both, but they’re independent and unrelated.
  - argomo 11mo ago
    For me, it's an especially bad argument because the sloppy nature of HTML parsing is NOT a virtue... it's a source of bugs, vulnerabilities, and incompatibilities that provides (yet another) technical moat for existing web browsers. It's a huge tragedy that HTML5 beat XHTML.
    - stingraycharles 11mo ago
      Maybe, but after several decades of engineering, I became much more of an advocate for actual observed user behavior, which is chaotic, and as such nowadays preach “embrace chaos”. That’s what HTML and the browsers did. They accepted humans are terribly bad at following instructions when you want to cater to a broad audience, and as such embraced error correction. The end result is that the early days were awesome because everyone knew how to build websites. Perhaps in the current day and age, where people hardly write hand-written HTML anymore, this can be reconsidered. But a new, more restrictive format would have to show real benefits, because it’s precisely as I say: people don’t really write raw HTML anymore so it’s kind of a moot point.
N_Lens 11mo ago
I think the Author diverges from the main point - that web standards and browsers' interpretation rules are loosely held (tolerance), towards indirectly attacking the current US administration which is allegedly trending towards intolerance and isolationism. Bit of a weird tangent (Though not inaccurate).
- shakna 11mo ago
  Allegedly...? They're quite explicit about it.
- wredcoll 11mo ago
  It's literally a metaphor about the benefits of tolerance.
whycombinetor 11mo ago
What a bizarre bait and switch. Starts talking about browsers allowing malformed HTML and uses that to draw conclusions about allowing certain types of people.
- wredcoll 11mo ago
  My god, and we thought those english teachers were idiots when they insisted we should learn things like reading comprehension and metaphors.
  - whycombinetor 11mo ago
    It's a poor metaphor. Real tolerance necessitates intolerance - see Marcuse. What is a browser going to do, send malformed HTTP requests and name-and-shame any server who refuses to respond? Servers vs. browsers is not the same type of relationship as people vs. people. Not to mention that the author's metaphor is implying that certain types of people are malformed.
  - dingnuts 11mo ago
    [dead]
  - nicbou 11mo ago
    I understand what the author is trying to say, and I agree with the second half of the text, but the link between both halves is tenuous at best.
- edent 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
- arp242 11mo ago
  So these certain types of people should not be allowed? Or what are you trying to say here?
charcircuit 11mo ago
>But the web works because browsers are tolerant. This is more of an artifact of needing to be compatibile with other browsers and more of an arbitrary decision where once one browser starts allowing all sorts of input than everyone else may start needing to if content starts relying on it. >But the world is better for it. It makes compatibility between different browsers more complicated due to adding a ton of edge cases that all need to be handled the same way as opposed to following a standardized way of writing pages. >The user experience of XHTML was rubbish. The disrespect shown to anyone for deviating from the One True Path made it an unwelcoming and unfriendly place. The UX could be improved along with developer tools making it harder to mess up and easy to spot mistakes. For example many internet forums have similar requirements of needing to match formatting tags and those have work successfully despite being strict. I think the real issue was that XHTML was introduced too late. Trying to fix things in a decentralized ecosystem is an extremely big uphill battle. If you don't fix things at the very start things can grow out of one's control. >The beauty of the web as a platform is that it isn't a monoculture. There is also beauty in that there is a standard that everyone can follow to ensure that pages written can work the same in all browsers. >I cannot fathom how someone can look at the beautiful diversity of the web and then declare that only pure-blooded people should live in a particular city. The way people interact with each other in the real world is very different than the way browsers render pages. I do not think such a comparison makes any sense to make. >How do you acknowledge that the father of the computer was a homosexual, brutally bullied by the state into suicide, and then fund groups that want to deny gay people fundamental human rights? Just because someone was in the right place at the right time does not mean that they are of perfect moral character. It's similar to the quote to never meet your heros. The people you may look up to in regards to some achievement may not be the best of character and keeping a distance from them may be the best else your opinion of them may be tarnished. >When you throw slurs and denigrate people's pronouns, your ignorance and hatred does a disservice to history and drives away the next generation of talent. I disagree that this happens. At best it discourages a subset of the next generation, but it is not a subset I would like to work with. These kinds of people could also drive away other potential talent too. Simply increasing the number as opposed to trying to build a positive, healthy, culture and growing it I don't think is the best idea. >This isn't an academic argument over big-endian or little-endian. It could be about these 2 choices. For example x86 processors were able to be extremely successful despite not being tolerant between big and little endian. By picking a single one and running with it, it's been able to help unify computing on little endian.
mvdtnz 11mo ago
This author needs to either be specific about who and what they're talking about or not bother. I don't have the context to understand their specific complaints and I'm not motivated to seek it out.
- edent 11mo ago
  The author (me) wasn't writing for you. If you haven't been paying attention to the various bigots trying to rouse hate from their position of technology prominence, then I don't think my post will convince you of anything
  - mvdtnz 11mo ago
    You strike me as a deeply unpleasant person.
  - lelanthran 11mo ago
    > If you haven't been paying attention to the various bigots trying to rouse hate from their position of technology prominence, then I don't think my post will convince you of anything You think your post is not one trying to rouse hate against specific people? You ever come across the word thoughtcrime? You think telling perhaps 50% or the population they "have no business being here" is inclusive? A large number of the classes who you pretend to be representing actually don't buy into oppression olympics. You want to write a screed against the owner of X? Sure, go ahead. But your screed is against anyone who doesn't care about verifying a person's race, gender or sexual orientation. You're presenting an extremist "you're with us or against us" view; some of us who aren't racist, sexist, misogynist, etc also don't want to have to pass your purity test. Some people just want the puritannicals to leave everyone alone.
    - wredcoll 11mo ago
      > You think your post is not one trying to rouse hate against specific people? It's taken me a while to understand what I find so abhorrent about this frequent rhetorical device and I finally realized it's just plain ol' false equivalence. Hating nazis for the harm they've caused is, in fact, just fine. Hating someone because they were born jewish/black/gay/whatever, is not fine. Pretending that people out here advocating for deportation/camps/imprisonment for the crimes of skin color or religion or whatever else is the same moral equivalence as those people just wanting to be left alone is leaving the realm of stupidity and verging on malice. > Some people just want the puritannicals to leave everyone alone It's, uh, "weird" that your problem isn't with the bigotry and bigots but with the people who point it out.
lone-cloud 11mo ago
When I finished reading it I thought it was an anti-Trump piece, but the author also wrote: "That's why it baffles me that some prominent technologists embrace hateful ideologies.". Was Trump a techie too? He must have been behind the creation of JS. "The ARM processor which powers the modern world was co-designed by a trans woman." This is not factually correct. Roger Wilson was one of the designers of the processor, but he didn't transition to become Sophie Wilson until 9 years after the first release of ARM1 according to Wikipedia.
- marcus_holmes 11mo ago
  Interesting point: was she "trans" before she transitioned, or only afterwards? Lots of queer folks are pretending to be straight. Or do they only become queer when they emerge from the closet?
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - jdpage 11mo ago
    Yes, the understanding is that trans people were always trans. It may have taken time for them to understand that and perhaps more to decide to adopt that identity publicly, but they're not "not trans" before that. Other queer identities are generally thought of the same way in queer communities: many people have early experiences (e.g. fixating on same-sex characters in fiction the way peers might opposite-sex characters) that they later realise were early expressions of their orientation.
    - marcus_holmes 11mo ago
      That makes sense, thanks :)
- edent 11mo ago
  The author (me) is one of literally dozens of people who doesn't live in the USA. We don't all obsess over a foreign politician. As for Sophie Wilson, I suggest you speak to your trans friends about whether they were trans before they publicly transitioned. If you don't have any trans friends, perhaps reflect on why that is.
deleted 11mo ago
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deleted 11mo ago
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simianwords 11mo ago
XML exists so infinity migration should be allowed?
- BergAndCo 11mo ago
  [dead]
Nextgrid 11mo ago
The right-wing extremism we now have in the US is the expected knee-jerk reaction to the left-wing extremism that came before it. In both cases there's a few true believers and a lot of opportunists who use the cause as a way to further their own agenda. It happened with the left (the master branch rename being the stupidest example), it's now happening in the right, with big words and performative actions such as ICE raids while the root cause of the problem is not addressed (industries reliant on large-scale illegal immigrant labor are left alone). The right answer is somewhere in the middle of the two camps. Unfortunately until then people suffer on both sides while opportunists use the conflict for their own interests.
- wredcoll 11mo ago
  Good point dude, a few super online people writing forum posts about changing the default name of the main git branch is exactly equivalent to launching gestapo style terror raids on the population at large while ignoring the consitution and due process. Tomato - tomahto am I right?
- edent 11mo ago
  The idea that the US has experienced anything even close to moderate left-wing policies is - from the perspective of an outsider - laughable. I'd love to know what extreme positions you think US politicians have enforced and what the moderate position is.
- amatecha 11mo ago
  What left-wing extremism was that, exactly? Extreme upholding of human rights and equality? Extreme kindness and respect for fellow human beings? Extreme acceptance of people from all backgrounds, religious beliefs and sexual orientation? Extreme letting people live their damn life in whatever way they want as long as it doesn't harm others? Yeah, who wouldn't want to push back on that, sounds terrible eh? So on this so-called extreme left, what exactly was/is so bad? You are expected to be nice to people when you meet them? You should consider the feelings of other human beings before you act? You had to rename a git branch because most of the people on your team agreed it's kinda lame to use a reference to slavery in a technical term? I've always wondered what people think the "extreme left" is and why they even remotely think it's somehow just as bad as the fascistic bullshit that sadistic, fear-driven socipaths keep working towards.
tayo42 11mo ago
[flagged]
gaigalas 11mo ago
Dude. HTML4 era was full of parser hacks. Increasingly more and more parser hacks. XHTML tried to solve that, and make HTML parsing more acessible to everyone. It's not about rigor, it's about making it simpler. HTML5 goes in the other direction. It formalized all those hacks into very, very strict parsing rules. It's super strict and specific, to the point that only companies with large resources can realistically invest in a proper HTML5 engine. So, the metaphor does not hold. You actually don't need a technical-aspect analogue to advocate for better, more inclusive human behavior. It's much better if you don't rely on those. People should not need a spec as a mirror to understand that.
- bonesss 11mo ago
  Well put. In that broken metaphor we’ve seemingly enter into a web ‘inclusiveness’ discussion focused on pronouns over, say, accessibility for visually impaired readers and readers reliant on tool-based assistance… Degenerative diseases and chronic functional limitations are super, duper, inclusive to start with. From SGML and crystallizing the dreams of archivists, librarians, and academics for centuries we’ve ended in a place where actual Microsoft has to use other companies’ web engine because “too ‘spensive” and the ability to even copy text from a website isn’t a guarantee. If you can even see the text under the ads, inline ads, the cookie popup, the delayed email list popup, and then the helpful ai chat agent pop-up. Stricter markup yields simpler tooling yields better accessibility and transformations. Letting the public web degenerate hurts humanity, every race and creed included.
Incipient 11mo ago
This whole article has, to be ragebait - surely? It's such a inane piece of writing, the world needs to give less time to anyone that genuinely holds these views. They're entitled to hold them, but they're still wrong. >It had an intolerant ideology. Without going into the various reasons why its trash, conforming to a spec is not intolerance, it's success. Imagine the Brooklyn bridge design committee saying "requiring exactly 1 inch plate is intolerance!! You can't discriminate against different thicknesses, all thicknesses are equally valuable!" What a useless position to hold.
- raincole 11mo ago
  Thank you. These are right out of my mouth. I mean I'd have made a similar comment if I didn't worry the strong words would get me flagged. The whole article is weird af. How are tolerating XHTML syntax error and tolerating different sexualities remotely comparable? The metaphor stretches itself so thin that you can see the fallacies beneath.
- csallen 11mo ago
  > Imagine the Brooklyn bridge design committee saying "requiring exactly 1 inch plate is intolerance!! The Brooklyn bridge is a singular piece of infrastructure that millions depend on. I think it makes for a bad analogy. A better analogy would be something more like websites, where people can tinker and create and contribute without much consequence. For example, the local community garden's board saying, "Requiring a precise and strictly uniform planting layout and soil composition is intolerance!" Well... that'd be quite reasonable?
  - nish__ 11mo ago
    It's bad because it makes it harder to implement a browser so the "spec" just becomes whatever the leading implementation supports. When I clicked on the article, I thought it was going to be about how the web gives a space for all voices even the marginalized or minorities to be seen/heard. Not this nonsense.
- dang 11mo ago
  This comment breaks HN's guidelines in many ways. Can you please review them and stick to the rules? We're trying for something quite different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html p.s. If you meant your comment as an amusing meta play on intolerance, then I'm sorry for misreading. That would of course be much better, but after a bit of wavering I concluded that you actually meant what you were saying here.
dokyun 11mo ago
What the web runs on is freedom, the freedom to express and disseminate any information one pleases with impunity. That prominent figureheads embrace the hateful ideologies that you speak of is merely a tide of the current times, and will change as soon as they become unpopular, just as they had quit embracing this "tolerance" which was in full force a few years prior. Because they are not about a hate of people, but hate of freedom: hate is merely a pretense, a convenient vehicle through which freedoms can be taken. I think freedom is the most important thing worth fighting for, and you had my support up until now. But then you go on to say that those outside your own window of ideology have no place here. It's much the same methods that the people you complain of employ: to be disingenuous about what you really want-- it's your inability to force your will upon others that you're frustrated with. You have missed the forest for the trees, and the context has already been created for you: you are projecting a battle for the rights of certain groups onto a battle against the rights of all, and you've been turned against yourself. Freedom is something, if you believe in it, you must believe in in its entirety: not almost-freedom, or a convenient sliver of freedom that fits into your own ideological window. You lack the qualifications to exercise tolerance.
WhyOhWhyQ 11mo ago
Well that took a surprising turn. (1) Friendly dunking on someone named todepond. (2) Interesting ideas about xhtml... looks like I'm going to learn something here. (3) Ideological conflict. Is there a backstory here? Or is this just random venting? Anyways, I reject the idea that loose programming is more "tolerant" in any sociological manner.
gldrk 11mo ago
>You can make your HTML as malformed as you like and the web-browser will do its best to display the page for you. I love the todepond website, but the source-code makes me break out in a cold sweat. Yet it renders just fine. It renders just fine because it is syntactically valid HTML. HTML is not and is not supposed to be XML. It is originally an SGML application described by its Document Type Definition and SGML Declaration (https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/HTML4.decl https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/HTML4.decl). HTML uses and has always used many SGML features not found in XML, such as tag inference (<html><title> becomes <html><head><title>, becomes ). Some of these, like SHORTTAG, were never even implemented in browsers. These days HTML is defined by the WHATWG ‘living standard’, which largely just restates the SGML DTD rules in plain language. (Okay, https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.todepond.com%2F https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.todepond.... shows a few minor errors, bet you couldn’t spot them.) This is independent of the fact that browsers do try their best to render objectively broken markup, usually by ignoring the broken parts. In principle they could do the same with XHTML, but someone decided it would be ‘helpful’ to show the parser’s diagnostic output instead, and the rest is history.
- raincole 11mo ago
 > that browsers do try their best to render objectively broken markup And it's a cancerous engineering principle. People say NullPointerException is the one billion error, but (the misuse of) Postel's Law on web frontend is a multi-billion error. Once one mainstream browser decided to "tolerate" an error, websites would start relying on that behavior, making it a permanent feature of web. If browsers were less tolerant the whole frontend development would be much smoother. The past decade of JavaScript framework farce would have probably never happened. The proper way to deal with syntax is making better tools: linters, interpreters and compilers that spew clear error messages. Not trying to 'tolerant' errors.
 - tadfisher 11mo ago
 The tolerance is now precisely specified in the HTML5 parsing algorithm, far from "try their best". This is good, because browsers fail in mostly the same ways as each other, humans do not need a CS degree to handwrite Web content, and your tools can still write perfectly valid HTML5.
groby_b 11mo ago
Postel was wrong, and it's got nothing to do with tolerance of other people, and everything with solid engineering (or encouraging the absence thereof). It mattered for rapid adoption, it is the curse of any stable system. But if we must make stretched analogies, I'll give you instead "The Standard You Walk Past" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_TfZdIhIgg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_TfZdIhIgg It's making a pretty compelling case that keeping standards matters, "anything goes" is a bad idea, and it does all that in the name of tolerance towards other humans.
bitwize 11mo ago
Postel's Law was one of those Great Mistakes of computing, alongside null pointers, fork(2), and well, C in general. Conform to the spec or be in error. If you allow for sloppiness, you create a problem because different implementations will tolerate different kinds of sloppiness, yielding incompatibilities and horrors like "quirks mode". XHTML tried to rein this in but by then the cat was out of the bag, and every Tom, Dick, and Mary who was trying to learn HTML was used to the mire tolerant behavior.
- Artoooooor 11mo ago
  Maybe developers should be held to stricter standards than their users. I can demand developers to close tags they are expected to close. But users should be allowed to provide their document numbers as "12345" "123 45" or "12-34-5" if all these notations are used in their country.
  - bitwize 11mo ago
    Then specify the accepted forms and specify a canonicalization algorithm to translate the acceptable forms into some base representation. Don't just leave it up to implementations.
d--b 11mo ago
I mean no offense but comparing fault tolerance to being tolerant with other people only works because it’s the same word that’s used for both meanings. But that has absolutely nothing to do. If it weren’t the case, you’d argue that people pushing XHTML were intolerant bastards.
curtisblaine 11mo ago
This article is a prime example of false equivalence. The cool thing about false equivalence is that, when you throw the laws of logic out of the window, you can prove pretty much everything. Anyone can write a specular article proving that intolerance is actually good since very stricter programming languages (like Rust and its borrow checker) are inherently safer.
- Imustaskforhelp 11mo ago
  I agree, thank you for giving me the word to this and giving an explaination too I just believe that there are ways to systemetically prove both of these things independently and I am not sure about the XHTML and other debate but here is my thoughts on "tolerance" itself I don't think that there is an inherent purpose is life, we have to build one for ourselves, what is the most rare thing in the universe, its not any material or power or anything worth having but rather friendships and enjoyments and treating people as the ends and not means to something. (My own summary-ish from Everything is fcked by Mark manson, not the best writer but I was young when I read the book and so maybe I can recommend it) Then reading about how to win friends and influence people, One of the key points I took from it is to be more agreeable and try to find common points you can work upon and set aside the differences and thus tolerance and there are 10 s of example from the book where I can share but basically debates help noone if they become petty, if we have disagreements they should be respectful in a way... These are my views on how to treat everyone equally I guess which I might wish to be applied to myself too so thats why I apply it too others or try to in a way too Personally I hate extremism from both sides since I feel that its bad but I can understand why people can get extremism from both sides and I try to give them chances to try to improve the situation from mediocre opinions if someone is too extremist from any side if I can be honest. I think extremism in general is bad I guess tho. Fck social media for making everyone nowadays so extremist tho. The only people I am extremist towards is big tech when you realize that facebook targets young girls and sees if they delete their photos, they are insecure and shoves beauty ads on their face. This behaviour is really sickening and I think we can all agree that.
karlkloss 11mo ago
My tolerance for online ads is zero. Do I break the web?
- Artoooooor 11mo ago
  Maybe you are hateful and intolerant to ads!
  - akimbostrawman 11mo ago
    So he better stops because as we know hate is always bad and often even illegal. Love the ads now!
DeathArrow 11mo ago
Cherry picking examples from science, technology or other fields to support an ideology isn't going to attract external supporters to that ideology but to make the bias stronger for the people who already believe in that ideology. Also, I rather read more "hacker news" and less ideological ramblings.
DeathArrow 11mo ago
Just imagine if financial software would run on tolerance. Or medical software. Or software controlling planes, trains or nuclear power plants.
Imustaskforhelp 11mo ago
> Denying rights to others is poison. Wishing violence on people because of their heritage is harmful to all of us. I think this is true for all cases, the author gives us example of trans co creator of arm architecture and alan turing and how their contributions in the web mattered But I think quite frankly, even if that might not be the case, there STILL ISNT any reason why we should discriminate and I feel like some part of the intepretation I got was that we should be tolerant to all communities currently still persecuted because some part of them contributed to us... But what about communities that did not support you because they weren't in the shape of? I feel like we should be tolerant to them. I tend to stay less political nowadays but just look at the case of sudan. Its state is atrocious. I am not sure if sudan contributed quite heavily on the web or not so pardon me but even if they might not have, We should still be tolerant and like stop the atrocities happening there in my opinion. Basically the point I am trying to make might be obvious but with or without the creations of alan turing, and co creator of arm, We should still be tolerant to each other as long as they are tolerant to us, thus a tolerant society. I like referring to the paradox of tolerance as its a key of literally every problem in my opinion and this time tho its actually as clear as day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance I think what we as a society need is to look at if we are infighting with each other over petty differences created by spews of lies by people in power to stay in power so that we infight. The british used conquer and divide on India and africa which I am not going to lie, still impacts these countries. I am pretty sure that people do divide and conquer on their own people too, Power and the Powerful don't discriminate in this sense. TLDR: We should be tolerant of each other as a whole even if there might not be any web contributions simply because being kind is mostly good I guess but also we should be intolerant to the true intolerant of society which try to create this divide from (both sides) imo and just try to remove any type of extremism and actually focus on class issues too.
DeathArrow 11mo ago
To credit a technical advance to a person's identity is to commit the 'Correlation is not Causation' fallacy. While diversity in a technical pool is interesting, the technical merit of the contribution must stand alone, independent of the contributor's personal characteristics. Shifting the focus from 'Does it work?' to 'Who wrote it?' is fundamentally anti-meritocratic and undermines the value of the technical discussion. The health of a technical community like this one depends on its ability to separate the merit of the work from the moral character of the contributor. This is a necessary separation to preserve the integrity of the technical commons. For instance, a paper on a secure hash algorithm should be judged only on its mathematical proof, regardless of the author's personal life. Any attempt to link the two injects ad hominem fallacy into a technical evaluation.
- edent 11mo ago
  You'll notice that the author (me) didn't actually credit the invention of the computer to Turing's sexuality. But it is an undeniable fact that he was gay. If the British government had banned him from working at Bletchly Park because of that, would the computer still have been developed? Certainly he wasn't the only one working on it, but historians and computer scientists seem to agree that he was a key figure. The health of a technical community depends on its ability to attract contributors from a wide variety of backgrounds. We agree that the result of the work is what is important. I'm arguing that Stephen Hawking can't participate unless you install wheelchair ramps.
Artoooooor 11mo ago
>The disrespect shown to anyone for deviating from the One True Path made it an unwelcoming and unfriendly place. Standards are the One True Path. That's why they are standards. I see no disrespect in enforcing them. Even more - the ones not following them and forcing users to burn additional CPU cycles because browsers have to assume they may be parsing crap are the disrespectful ones. Come on, it's not that hard, especially with help of IDEs.
liveoneggs 11mo ago
The web is built on standards/RFCs (laws) + implementation and enforcement of those standards (executive). The citizens of the web are just as apathetic/short-sighted as your average voter and will embrace the walled garden (authoritarianism) if it fits their current narrative.
account42 11mo ago
> History shows us that all progress comes from the meeting of diverse people, with different ideas, and different backgrounds. Maybe don't discard people as "hateful" just because you don't agree with their ideas then.
BergAndCo 11mo ago
[dead]

101 points by speckx 1y ago

There are 2 webs. web apps and web sites. web apps require a [java|ecma]script whatng cartel web engine, more and more only the gogol one (blink) will "correctly" work (abuse of dominant position). web sites are noscript/basic (x)html ("forms" and the <audio> <video> elements). Usually a "semantic" 2D table with proper ids for navigation.

ktpsns 1y ago

The older ones among us remember when XML took over the world and everyone was supposed to use strict XHTML. It turned out that the strength of the HTML ecosystem was its fault tolerance. HTML4 was the "sloppy" answer to XHTML. It brought HTML back from a data language to a markup language. Every Markdown parser is similarly fault-tolerant as HTML parsers. However, CSS and JS are not error-tolerant. A syntax error in a CSS rule causes it to be ignored. An unhandled JavaScript exception is a hard stop. This way, web does not run on tolerance.

MangoToupe 11mo ago
> It turned out that the strength of the HTML ecosystem was its fault tolerance. I don't think this was a "strength" of html so much as a necessity to not break the internet. I certainly preferred the formal nature of xhtml to html 5. But, we're stuck with needing to render obviously formally-broken documents.
- wredcoll 11mo ago
  So it's not a strength it's a necessity? I'm not sure these words mean what you think they do...
  - MangoToupe 11mo ago
    Yes, I would describe this as a liability. It costs more to implement basic html interpretation with zero benefit
    - rerdavies 11mo ago
      The benefit accrues to developers, who get more consistent behavior across browsers. In the bad old days, errors that one browser might silently recover from would trigger unspecified recover behavior on other browsers that wasn't consistent.
sebular 11mo ago
Nonsense. Open the console on l any mediocre webpage and you’ll see a stream of JavaScript errors. But it’s still working. One script crashes? Doesn’t matter to any other script. Unhandled exception? Rest of the app is still working fine. Hell, that button may work if you just click it again. And CSS syntax error causing only that single line of code to be ignored while every other line of code works fine is the very definition of fault tolerance. What else could you possibly want?
- trimethylpurine 11mo ago
  All that is very good. But as a back end guy dabbling in front end, it would be more welcoming if JS was a little intuitive. I'm very thankful for LLMs now helping with that a bit, but honestly even they seem to fail at JS more so than other languages, at least in my experience so far.
  - auxiliarymoose 11mo ago
    Much of the challenge in JS today is due to unnecessary packages, build systems, and workarounds found throughout blogs and forums which were reasonable 5-10 years ago but aren't really needed today. Unfortunately, LLMs tend to output old-fashioned JS. With (almost) everyone using an up-to-date standards-compliant browser, you can sidestep most of the complexity and weirdness by just using the standard library and ES Modules (instead of frameworks, libraries, build systems etc.) and an IDE with good intellisense + inline documentation lookup. MDN documentation is good and up to date overall, but I'm not sure there is a good overview/entry point resource that is up to date as of today... maybe I'll have to write it!
  - socalgal2 11mo ago
    I don't know if my experience is any guide but for me, coming from C++, I hated JS (~2008 is when my job required it). I kept trying to use it as C++. Over time I learned to love it. I stopped trying to make it C++ (or Java/C#, etc...) and actually embraced it. Now the tables have turned (to some degree). I can write programs in JS in 1-3 days that take weeks or months in C++/C#/Java Some of this comes from the browser environment. I get portable 2d/3d/gpu graphics, portable audio, image loading, video playback, and complex text rendering and layout, portably and for free. Back in C++/C# land, every new project is a chore of setup and fighting with linkers and build options etc. I post some code in a github repo with github pages on, or in some JS playground like codepen, and instantly share it with all friends regardless of platform. Another comes from the language itself. I can often generically wrap existing APIs in a few lines of codes, things that used to take days and/or large program refactors to do in C/C++. And, the tools are pretty good, Chrome DevTools are as good or better than my experience in C/C++. Right now, when I try to debug in C++ in XCode, std::string shows nothing and containers are inscrutable. I'm sure that's fixable. The point is, I shouldn't have to fix basic stuff. Now of course I'm using TypeScript for some projects and the types help but I'm often glad for the escape hatch for more generic code. It takes me 15 mins to write some generic system in JS and then 2-4hrs to figure out how to get TypeScript happy to type it. As an example, a function that creates a new TypedArray of the same type as some src array. Easy to write in JS. Harder to type in TS. That's effectively part of the same issues I have in C++, the part that stalls progress, that I don't have the escape hatch for generic solutions. PS: Yes, it's not that hard to type a generic TypedArray function in TS. But it's certainly a learning curve, or was before LLMs, and I've had to type much more complex functions that required no typing in JS
re 11mo ago
> HTML4 was the "sloppy" answer to XHTML I think you mean HTML5, which exhaustively specified how to do parsing in a fault-tolerant, normalizing way. HTML 4 (and 4.01) predated XHTML 1.0, and HTML 4.01 attempted to take things in a stricter direction, introducing a "Strict" DTD that did things like drop the tag, in pursuit of separating structure and presentation.
verandaguy 11mo ago
Funny enough my impression of JS (the kind you'd write in 2007 more than the type you see now, mind you) is that it's remarkably tolerant; many idioms and operations which would cause, in other languages, runtime errors or compile errors, would just get steamrolled over in JS because of just how much built-in flexibility the uber-weak type system (plus liberal use of the prototype pattern in the stdlib) allows for. - Wanna subtract a string from a number? That's not a type error, that's a `NaN` -- which is just a perfectly-valid IEEE 754 float, after all, and we all float down here. - Hell -- arithmetic between arbitrary data types? Chances are you get `[object Object]` (either as a string literal or an *actual* object), which you can still operate on. - Accessing an object field but you typoed the field name? No worries, that's just `undefined`, and you can always operate on `undefined` values. Frankly, while I haven't had a frontend focus in about 15 years, I struggle to think of any situation where calling a stdlib function or standard language feature would result in an actual exception rather than just an off behaviour that'll accumulate over time the more of them you stack on eachother. I guess calling an undefined variable is a ReferenceError, but beyond that... (This comment shouldn't be taken as an endorsement of this school of language design)
- auxiliarymoose 11mo ago
  It is also (nearly) impossible to completely crash a web page. There isn't a main loop that can panic out. No matter where an exception gets thrown, the overall application keeps going and responding to events. Can't access a network resource? API returns an unexpected error? Library crashes? Browser extension breaks something? Doesn't matter. The user can still view and scroll the page, and the rest of it will probably keep working, too.
  - franga2000 11mo ago
    Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information). The amount of articles on HN that render perfectly, then vanish a second later and are replaced by this error message is insane. Yes, I'm using an old unmaintained Android HN reader with a questionable webview. No, that's not an excuse to delete a perfectly rendered from right in front of my eyes.
chrismorgan 11mo ago
> CSS [is] not error-tolerant. A syntax error in a CSS rule causes it to be ignored. That is error-tolerant, in basically the same way HTML is. > An unhandled JavaScript exception is a hard stop. A more appropriate example here is that a JS syntax error stops the entire script from running. That’s the XML parser approach.
account42 11mo ago
> However, CSS and JS are not error-tolerant. A syntax error in a CSS rule causes it to be ignored. This is good though as it provides a means for progressive enhancement using new features only when they are available and falling back on previous rules if they are not. It's very different from the syntax error -> RIP page nonsense of XHTML.
- zamadatix 11mo ago
  In the CSS half, in the JS half it's really no different. Of course that's fine because "best effort logic" doesn't provide nearly as much value as "best effort layout".

blitz_skull 11mo ago

Who, exactly, is this guy angry at?

Mathnerd314 11mo ago

But in contrast, web communities run on moderation, i.e. a sort of intolerance of bad content. The lesson is that technical issues and social issues really don't mix. You can't conclude anything from one versus the other. Case in point, cryptocurrency was supposed to be the anarchist's dream, but now it's being adopted by some central banks.

StilesCrisis 11mo ago
Moderation isn't used for filtering out the most tolerant individuals. (Look up the paradox of tolerance sometime.)
tclancy 11mo ago
> technical issues and social issues really don't mix I don’t think that’s true in the least. I think it’s true there are no technical solutions to social problems, but any and all technology comes from people forming societies and seeking solutions. This comment feels the same as people saying “Stick to sports” about athletes talking politics. Everything is political. If you don’t think something is, it tends to be because one is insulated from the politics that affect it.
- bluefirebrand 11mo ago
  > Everything is political This is such a tedious worldview Maybe everything is political, but it doesn't have to be that way
  - edent 11mo ago
    "there are only: Two races: white and "political" Two genders: Male and "political" Two hair styles for women: long and "political" Two sexualities: straight and "political" Two body types: normative and "political" https://twitter.com/emmahvossen/status/1138841342921060354?lang=en https://twitter.com/emmahvossen/status/1138841342921060354?l...
  - lambertsimnel 11mo ago
    I wonder whether people who disagree about this are talking at crossed purposes. I think there's politics in a narrower sense (concerning partisanship and state intervention) and politics in a wider sense (concerning power relations and decision making). To depoliticise things in the former sense (by depolarising and deregulating) isn't to depoliticise them at all in the latter sense. In society, arguably everything is economic, legal, psychological, etc. Presumably, what people mean when they say "everything is political" is that politics in the wider sense is both important and on this list.

didgetmaster 11mo ago

This guy lost me when he started talking about diversity issues instead of tech. I couldn't care less about the race, gender, or sexual orientation of the person(s) who created the hardware or software that I use. Does it work? Is it easy to understand and use? These are the things I am interested in. I am reminded of an early cartoon of a dog sitting at a computer saying 'On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog!'

tclancy 11mo ago
Two paths diverged in a wood. You took one and the Whole Point took the other here.
fwip 11mo ago
Do you care, then, that people are driving away contributors specifically because of their race/gender/orientation? Because without them, we wouldn't have [the stuff in the article].
stingraycharles 11mo ago
Yeah I think it’s quite a leap to go from “html is successful because it’s fault tolerant” to “this applies to communities as well”. There’s obviously a case to be made for both, but they’re independent and unrelated.
- argomo 11mo ago
  For me, it's an especially bad argument because the sloppy nature of HTML parsing is NOT a virtue... it's a source of bugs, vulnerabilities, and incompatibilities that provides (yet another) technical moat for existing web browsers. It's a huge tragedy that HTML5 beat XHTML.
  - stingraycharles 11mo ago
    Maybe, but after several decades of engineering, I became much more of an advocate for actual observed user behavior, which is chaotic, and as such nowadays preach “embrace chaos”. That’s what HTML and the browsers did. They accepted humans are terribly bad at following instructions when you want to cater to a broad audience, and as such embraced error correction. The end result is that the early days were awesome because everyone knew how to build websites. Perhaps in the current day and age, where people hardly write hand-written HTML anymore, this can be reconsidered. But a new, more restrictive format would have to show real benefits, because it’s precisely as I say: people don’t really write raw HTML anymore so it’s kind of a moot point.

N_Lens 11mo ago

I think the Author diverges from the main point - that web standards and browsers' interpretation rules are loosely held (tolerance), towards indirectly attacking the current US administration which is allegedly trending towards intolerance and isolationism. Bit of a weird tangent (Though not inaccurate).

shakna 11mo ago
Allegedly...? They're quite explicit about it.
wredcoll 11mo ago
It's literally a metaphor about the benefits of tolerance.

whycombinetor 11mo ago

What a bizarre bait and switch. Starts talking about browsers allowing malformed HTML and uses that to draw conclusions about allowing certain types of people.

wredcoll 11mo ago
My god, and we thought those english teachers were idiots when they insisted we should learn things like reading comprehension and metaphors.
- whycombinetor 11mo ago
  It's a poor metaphor. Real tolerance necessitates intolerance - see Marcuse. What is a browser going to do, send malformed HTTP requests and name-and-shame any server who refuses to respond? Servers vs. browsers is not the same type of relationship as people vs. people. Not to mention that the author's metaphor is implying that certain types of people are malformed.
- dingnuts 11mo ago
  [dead]
- nicbou 11mo ago
  I understand what the author is trying to say, and I agree with the second half of the text, but the link between both halves is tenuous at best.
edent 11mo ago
[flagged]
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
arp242 11mo ago
So these certain types of people should not be allowed? Or what are you trying to say here?

charcircuit 11mo ago

>But the web works because browsers are tolerant. This is more of an artifact of needing to be compatibile with other browsers and more of an arbitrary decision where once one browser starts allowing all sorts of input than everyone else may start needing to if content starts relying on it. >But the world is better for it. It makes compatibility between different browsers more complicated due to adding a ton of edge cases that all need to be handled the same way as opposed to following a standardized way of writing pages. >The user experience of XHTML was rubbish. The disrespect shown to anyone for deviating from the One True Path made it an unwelcoming and unfriendly place. The UX could be improved along with developer tools making it harder to mess up and easy to spot mistakes. For example many internet forums have similar requirements of needing to match formatting tags and those have work successfully despite being strict. I think the real issue was that XHTML was introduced too late. Trying to fix things in a decentralized ecosystem is an extremely big uphill battle. If you don't fix things at the very start things can grow out of one's control. >The beauty of the web as a platform is that it isn't a monoculture. There is also beauty in that there is a standard that everyone can follow to ensure that pages written can work the same in all browsers. >I cannot fathom how someone can look at the beautiful diversity of the web and then declare that only pure-blooded people should live in a particular city. The way people interact with each other in the real world is very different than the way browsers render pages. I do not think such a comparison makes any sense to make. >How do you acknowledge that the father of the computer was a homosexual, brutally bullied by the state into suicide, and then fund groups that want to deny gay people fundamental human rights? Just because someone was in the right place at the right time does not mean that they are of perfect moral character. It's similar to the quote to never meet your heros. The people you may look up to in regards to some achievement may not be the best of character and keeping a distance from them may be the best else your opinion of them may be tarnished. >When you throw slurs and denigrate people's pronouns, your ignorance and hatred does a disservice to history and drives away the next generation of talent. I disagree that this happens. At best it discourages a subset of the next generation, but it is not a subset I would like to work with. These kinds of people could also drive away other potential talent too. Simply increasing the number as opposed to trying to build a positive, healthy, culture and growing it I don't think is the best idea. >This isn't an academic argument over big-endian or little-endian. It could be about these 2 choices. For example x86 processors were able to be extremely successful despite not being tolerant between big and little endian. By picking a single one and running with it, it's been able to help unify computing on little endian.

mvdtnz 11mo ago

This author needs to either be specific about who and what they're talking about or not bother. I don't have the context to understand their specific complaints and I'm not motivated to seek it out.

edent 11mo ago
The author (me) wasn't writing for you. If you haven't been paying attention to the various bigots trying to rouse hate from their position of technology prominence, then I don't think my post will convince you of anything
- mvdtnz 11mo ago
  You strike me as a deeply unpleasant person.
- lelanthran 11mo ago
  > If you haven't been paying attention to the various bigots trying to rouse hate from their position of technology prominence, then I don't think my post will convince you of anything You think your post is not one trying to rouse hate against specific people? You ever come across the word thoughtcrime? You think telling perhaps 50% or the population they "have no business being here" is inclusive? A large number of the classes who you pretend to be representing actually don't buy into oppression olympics. You want to write a screed against the owner of X? Sure, go ahead. But your screed is against anyone who doesn't care about verifying a person's race, gender or sexual orientation. You're presenting an extremist "you're with us or against us" view; some of us who aren't racist, sexist, misogynist, etc also don't want to have to pass your purity test. Some people just want the puritannicals to leave everyone alone.
  - wredcoll 11mo ago
    > You think your post is not one trying to rouse hate against specific people? It's taken me a while to understand what I find so abhorrent about this frequent rhetorical device and I finally realized it's just plain ol' false equivalence. Hating nazis for the harm they've caused is, in fact, just fine. Hating someone because they were born jewish/black/gay/whatever, is not fine. Pretending that people out here advocating for deportation/camps/imprisonment for the crimes of skin color or religion or whatever else is the same moral equivalence as those people just wanting to be left alone is leaving the realm of stupidity and verging on malice. > Some people just want the puritannicals to leave everyone alone It's, uh, "weird" that your problem isn't with the bigotry and bigots but with the people who point it out.

lone-cloud 11mo ago

When I finished reading it I thought it was an anti-Trump piece, but the author also wrote: "That's why it baffles me that some prominent technologists embrace hateful ideologies.". Was Trump a techie too? He must have been behind the creation of JS. "The ARM processor which powers the modern world was co-designed by a trans woman." This is not factually correct. Roger Wilson was one of the designers of the processor, but he didn't transition to become Sophie Wilson until 9 years after the first release of ARM1 according to Wikipedia.

marcus_holmes 11mo ago
Interesting point: was she "trans" before she transitioned, or only afterwards? Lots of queer folks are pretending to be straight. Or do they only become queer when they emerge from the closet?
- deleted 11mo ago
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- jdpage 11mo ago
  Yes, the understanding is that trans people were always trans. It may have taken time for them to understand that and perhaps more to decide to adopt that identity publicly, but they're not "not trans" before that. Other queer identities are generally thought of the same way in queer communities: many people have early experiences (e.g. fixating on same-sex characters in fiction the way peers might opposite-sex characters) that they later realise were early expressions of their orientation.
  - marcus_holmes 11mo ago
    That makes sense, thanks :)
edent 11mo ago
The author (me) is one of literally dozens of people who doesn't live in the USA. We don't all obsess over a foreign politician. As for Sophie Wilson, I suggest you speak to your trans friends about whether they were trans before they publicly transitioned. If you don't have any trans friends, perhaps reflect on why that is.

deleted 11mo ago

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deleted 11mo ago

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simianwords 11mo ago

XML exists so infinity migration should be allowed?

BergAndCo 11mo ago
[dead]

Nextgrid 11mo ago

The right-wing extremism we now have in the US is the expected knee-jerk reaction to the left-wing extremism that came before it. In both cases there's a few true believers and a lot of opportunists who use the cause as a way to further their own agenda. It happened with the left (the master branch rename being the stupidest example), it's now happening in the right, with big words and performative actions such as ICE raids while the root cause of the problem is not addressed (industries reliant on large-scale illegal immigrant labor are left alone). The right answer is somewhere in the middle of the two camps. Unfortunately until then people suffer on both sides while opportunists use the conflict for their own interests.

wredcoll 11mo ago
Good point dude, a few super online people writing forum posts about changing the default name of the main git branch is exactly equivalent to launching gestapo style terror raids on the population at large while ignoring the consitution and due process. Tomato - tomahto am I right?
edent 11mo ago
The idea that the US has experienced anything even close to moderate left-wing policies is - from the perspective of an outsider - laughable. I'd love to know what extreme positions you think US politicians have enforced and what the moderate position is.
amatecha 11mo ago
What left-wing extremism was that, exactly? Extreme upholding of human rights and equality? Extreme kindness and respect for fellow human beings? Extreme acceptance of people from all backgrounds, religious beliefs and sexual orientation? Extreme letting people live their damn life in whatever way they want as long as it doesn't harm others? Yeah, who wouldn't want to push back on that, sounds terrible eh? So on this so-called extreme left, what exactly was/is so bad? You are expected to be nice to people when you meet them? You should consider the feelings of other human beings before you act? You had to rename a git branch because most of the people on your team agreed it's kinda lame to use a reference to slavery in a technical term? I've always wondered what people think the "extreme left" is and why they even remotely think it's somehow just as bad as the fascistic bullshit that sadistic, fear-driven socipaths keep working towards.

tayo42 11mo ago

[flagged]

gaigalas 11mo ago

Dude. HTML4 era was full of parser hacks. Increasingly more and more parser hacks. XHTML tried to solve that, and make HTML parsing more acessible to everyone. It's not about rigor, it's about making it simpler. HTML5 goes in the other direction. It formalized all those hacks into very, very strict parsing rules. It's super strict and specific, to the point that only companies with large resources can realistically invest in a proper HTML5 engine. So, the metaphor does not hold. You actually don't need a technical-aspect analogue to advocate for better, more inclusive human behavior. It's much better if you don't rely on those. People should not need a spec as a mirror to understand that.

bonesss 11mo ago
Well put. In that broken metaphor we’ve seemingly enter into a web ‘inclusiveness’ discussion focused on pronouns over, say, accessibility for visually impaired readers and readers reliant on tool-based assistance… Degenerative diseases and chronic functional limitations are super, duper, inclusive to start with. From SGML and crystallizing the dreams of archivists, librarians, and academics for centuries we’ve ended in a place where actual Microsoft has to use other companies’ web engine because “too ‘spensive” and the ability to even copy text from a website isn’t a guarantee. If you can even see the text under the ads, inline ads, the cookie popup, the delayed email list popup, and then the helpful ai chat agent pop-up. Stricter markup yields simpler tooling yields better accessibility and transformations. Letting the public web degenerate hurts humanity, every race and creed included.

Incipient 11mo ago

This whole article has, to be ragebait - surely? It's such a inane piece of writing, the world needs to give less time to anyone that genuinely holds these views. They're entitled to hold them, but they're still wrong. >It had an intolerant ideology. Without going into the various reasons why its trash, conforming to a spec is not intolerance, it's success. Imagine the Brooklyn bridge design committee saying "requiring exactly 1 inch plate is intolerance!! You can't discriminate against different thicknesses, all thicknesses are equally valuable!" What a useless position to hold.

raincole 11mo ago
Thank you. These are right out of my mouth. I mean I'd have made a similar comment if I didn't worry the strong words would get me flagged. The whole article is weird af. How are tolerating XHTML syntax error and tolerating different sexualities remotely comparable? The metaphor stretches itself so thin that you can see the fallacies beneath.
csallen 11mo ago
> Imagine the Brooklyn bridge design committee saying "requiring exactly 1 inch plate is intolerance!! The Brooklyn bridge is a singular piece of infrastructure that millions depend on. I think it makes for a bad analogy. A better analogy would be something more like websites, where people can tinker and create and contribute without much consequence. For example, the local community garden's board saying, "Requiring a precise and strictly uniform planting layout and soil composition is intolerance!" Well... that'd be quite reasonable?
- nish__ 11mo ago
  It's bad because it makes it harder to implement a browser so the "spec" just becomes whatever the leading implementation supports. When I clicked on the article, I thought it was going to be about how the web gives a space for all voices even the marginalized or minorities to be seen/heard. Not this nonsense.
dang 11mo ago
This comment breaks HN's guidelines in many ways. Can you please review them and stick to the rules? We're trying for something quite different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html p.s. If you meant your comment as an amusing meta play on intolerance, then I'm sorry for misreading. That would of course be much better, but after a bit of wavering I concluded that you actually meant what you were saying here.

dokyun 11mo ago

What the web runs on is freedom, the freedom to express and disseminate any information one pleases with impunity. That prominent figureheads embrace the hateful ideologies that you speak of is merely a tide of the current times, and will change as soon as they become unpopular, just as they had quit embracing this "tolerance" which was in full force a few years prior. Because they are not about a hate of people, but hate of freedom: hate is merely a pretense, a convenient vehicle through which freedoms can be taken. I think freedom is the most important thing worth fighting for, and you had my support up until now. But then you go on to say that those outside your own window of ideology have no place here. It's much the same methods that the people you complain of employ: to be disingenuous about what you really want-- it's your inability to force your will upon others that you're frustrated with. You have missed the forest for the trees, and the context has already been created for you: you are projecting a battle for the rights of certain groups onto a battle against the rights of all, and you've been turned against yourself. Freedom is something, if you believe in it, you must believe in in its entirety: not almost-freedom, or a convenient sliver of freedom that fits into your own ideological window. You lack the qualifications to exercise tolerance.

WhyOhWhyQ 11mo ago

Well that took a surprising turn. (1) Friendly dunking on someone named todepond. (2) Interesting ideas about xhtml... looks like I'm going to learn something here. (3) Ideological conflict. Is there a backstory here? Or is this just random venting? Anyways, I reject the idea that loose programming is more "tolerant" in any sociological manner.

gldrk 11mo ago

>You can make your HTML as malformed as you like and the web-browser will do its best to display the page for you. I love the todepond website, but the source-code makes me break out in a cold sweat. Yet it renders just fine. It renders just fine because it is syntactically valid HTML. HTML is not and is not supposed to be XML. It is originally an SGML application described by its Document Type Definition and SGML Declaration (https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/HTML4.decl https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/HTML4.decl). HTML uses and has always used many SGML features not found in XML, such as tag inference (<html><title> becomes <html><head><title>, becomes ). Some of these, like SHORTTAG, were never even implemented in browsers. These days HTML is defined by the WHATWG ‘living standard’, which largely just restates the SGML DTD rules in plain language. (Okay, https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.todepond.com%2F https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.todepond.... shows a few minor errors, bet you couldn’t spot them.) This is independent of the fact that browsers do try their best to render objectively broken markup, usually by ignoring the broken parts. In principle they could do the same with XHTML, but someone decided it would be ‘helpful’ to show the parser’s diagnostic output instead, and the rest is history.

raincole 11mo ago
> that browsers do try their best to render objectively broken markup And it's a cancerous engineering principle. People say NullPointerException is the one billion error, but (the misuse of) Postel's Law on web frontend is a multi-billion error. Once one mainstream browser decided to "tolerate" an error, websites would start relying on that behavior, making it a permanent feature of web. If browsers were less tolerant the whole frontend development would be much smoother. The past decade of JavaScript framework farce would have probably never happened. The proper way to deal with syntax is making better tools: linters, interpreters and compilers that spew clear error messages. Not trying to 'tolerant' errors.
- tadfisher 11mo ago
  The tolerance is now precisely specified in the HTML5 parsing algorithm, far from "try their best". This is good, because browsers fail in mostly the same ways as each other, humans do not need a CS degree to handwrite Web content, and your tools can still write perfectly valid HTML5.

groby_b 11mo ago

Postel was wrong, and it's got nothing to do with tolerance of other people, and everything with solid engineering (or encouraging the absence thereof). It mattered for rapid adoption, it is the curse of any stable system. But if we must make stretched analogies, I'll give you instead "The Standard You Walk Past" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_TfZdIhIgg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_TfZdIhIgg It's making a pretty compelling case that keeping standards matters, "anything goes" is a bad idea, and it does all that in the name of tolerance towards other humans.

bitwize 11mo ago

Postel's Law was one of those Great Mistakes of computing, alongside null pointers, fork(2), and well, C in general. Conform to the spec or be in error. If you allow for sloppiness, you create a problem because different implementations will tolerate different kinds of sloppiness, yielding incompatibilities and horrors like "quirks mode". XHTML tried to rein this in but by then the cat was out of the bag, and every Tom, Dick, and Mary who was trying to learn HTML was used to the mire tolerant behavior.

Artoooooor 11mo ago
Maybe developers should be held to stricter standards than their users. I can demand developers to close tags they are expected to close. But users should be allowed to provide their document numbers as "12345" "123 45" or "12-34-5" if all these notations are used in their country.
- bitwize 11mo ago
  Then specify the accepted forms and specify a canonicalization algorithm to translate the acceptable forms into some base representation. Don't just leave it up to implementations.

d--b 11mo ago

I mean no offense but comparing fault tolerance to being tolerant with other people only works because it’s the same word that’s used for both meanings. But that has absolutely nothing to do. If it weren’t the case, you’d argue that people pushing XHTML were intolerant bastards.

curtisblaine 11mo ago

This article is a prime example of false equivalence. The cool thing about false equivalence is that, when you throw the laws of logic out of the window, you can prove pretty much everything. Anyone can write a specular article proving that intolerance is actually good since very stricter programming languages (like Rust and its borrow checker) are inherently safer.

Imustaskforhelp 11mo ago
I agree, thank you for giving me the word to this and giving an explaination too I just believe that there are ways to systemetically prove both of these things independently and I am not sure about the XHTML and other debate but here is my thoughts on "tolerance" itself I don't think that there is an inherent purpose is life, we have to build one for ourselves, what is the most rare thing in the universe, its not any material or power or anything worth having but rather friendships and enjoyments and treating people as the ends and not means to something. (My own summary-ish from Everything is fcked by Mark manson, not the best writer but I was young when I read the book and so maybe I can recommend it) Then reading about how to win friends and influence people, One of the key points I took from it is to be more agreeable and try to find common points you can work upon and set aside the differences and thus tolerance and there are 10 s of example from the book where I can share but basically debates help noone if they become petty, if we have disagreements they should be respectful in a way... These are my views on how to treat everyone equally I guess which I might wish to be applied to myself too so thats why I apply it too others or try to in a way too Personally I hate extremism from both sides since I feel that its bad but I can understand why people can get extremism from both sides and I try to give them chances to try to improve the situation from mediocre opinions if someone is too extremist from any side if I can be honest. I think extremism in general is bad I guess tho. Fck social media for making everyone nowadays so extremist tho. The only people I am extremist towards is big tech when you realize that facebook targets young girls and sees if they delete their photos, they are insecure and shoves beauty ads on their face. This behaviour is really sickening and I think we can all agree that.

karlkloss 11mo ago

My tolerance for online ads is zero. Do I break the web?

Artoooooor 11mo ago
Maybe you are hateful and intolerant to ads!
- akimbostrawman 11mo ago
  So he better stops because as we know hate is always bad and often even illegal. Love the ads now!

DeathArrow 11mo ago

Cherry picking examples from science, technology or other fields to support an ideology isn't going to attract external supporters to that ideology but to make the bias stronger for the people who already believe in that ideology. Also, I rather read more "hacker news" and less ideological ramblings.

DeathArrow 11mo ago

Just imagine if financial software would run on tolerance. Or medical software. Or software controlling planes, trains or nuclear power plants.

Imustaskforhelp 11mo ago

> Denying rights to others is poison. Wishing violence on people because of their heritage is harmful to all of us. I think this is true for all cases, the author gives us example of trans co creator of arm architecture and alan turing and how their contributions in the web mattered But I think quite frankly, even if that might not be the case, there STILL ISNT any reason why we should discriminate and I feel like some part of the intepretation I got was that we should be tolerant to all communities currently still persecuted because some part of them contributed to us... But what about communities that did not support you because they weren't in the shape of? I feel like we should be tolerant to them. I tend to stay less political nowadays but just look at the case of sudan. Its state is atrocious. I am not sure if sudan contributed quite heavily on the web or not so pardon me but even if they might not have, We should still be tolerant and like stop the atrocities happening there in my opinion. Basically the point I am trying to make might be obvious but with or without the creations of alan turing, and co creator of arm, We should still be tolerant to each other as long as they are tolerant to us, thus a tolerant society. I like referring to the paradox of tolerance as its a key of literally every problem in my opinion and this time tho its actually as clear as day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance I think what we as a society need is to look at if we are infighting with each other over petty differences created by spews of lies by people in power to stay in power so that we infight. The british used conquer and divide on India and africa which I am not going to lie, still impacts these countries. I am pretty sure that people do divide and conquer on their own people too, Power and the Powerful don't discriminate in this sense. TLDR: We should be tolerant of each other as a whole even if there might not be any web contributions simply because being kind is mostly good I guess but also we should be intolerant to the true intolerant of society which try to create this divide from (both sides) imo and just try to remove any type of extremism and actually focus on class issues too.

DeathArrow 11mo ago

To credit a technical advance to a person's identity is to commit the 'Correlation is not Causation' fallacy. While diversity in a technical pool is interesting, the technical merit of the contribution must stand alone, independent of the contributor's personal characteristics. Shifting the focus from 'Does it work?' to 'Who wrote it?' is fundamentally anti-meritocratic and undermines the value of the technical discussion. The health of a technical community like this one depends on its ability to separate the merit of the work from the moral character of the contributor. This is a necessary separation to preserve the integrity of the technical commons. For instance, a paper on a secure hash algorithm should be judged only on its mathematical proof, regardless of the author's personal life. Any attempt to link the two injects ad hominem fallacy into a technical evaluation.

edent 11mo ago
You'll notice that the author (me) didn't actually credit the invention of the computer to Turing's sexuality. But it is an undeniable fact that he was gay. If the British government had banned him from working at Bletchly Park because of that, would the computer still have been developed? Certainly he wasn't the only one working on it, but historians and computer scientists seem to agree that he was a key figure. The health of a technical community depends on its ability to attract contributors from a wide variety of backgrounds. We agree that the result of the work is what is important. I'm arguing that Stephen Hawking can't participate unless you install wheelchair ramps.

Artoooooor 11mo ago

>The disrespect shown to anyone for deviating from the One True Path made it an unwelcoming and unfriendly place. Standards are the One True Path. That's why they are standards. I see no disrespect in enforcing them. Even more - the ones not following them and forcing users to burn additional CPU cycles because browsers have to assume they may be parsing crap are the disrespectful ones. Come on, it's not that hard, especially with help of IDEs.

liveoneggs 11mo ago

The web is built on standards/RFCs (laws) + implementation and enforcement of those standards (executive). The citizens of the web are just as apathetic/short-sighted as your average voter and will embrace the walled garden (authoritarianism) if it fits their current narrative.

account42 11mo ago

> History shows us that all progress comes from the meeting of diverse people, with different ideas, and different backgrounds. Maybe don't discard people as "hateful" just because you don't agree with their ideas then.

BergAndCo 11mo ago

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