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For some reason generating a valid wire format seems to be no problem for people when it comes to json. Forgot to escape a quote? Woops, that’s on me, should ha

For some reason generating a valid wire format seems to be no problem for people when it comes to json. Forgot to escape a quote? Woops, that’s on me, should have used a serializer. But add a few angled braces in there and lord have-a mercy, ain’t nobody can understand this ampersand mumbo jumbo, I wanna hand write my documents and generate wutever, yous better jus deal with it gosh dangit. I prefer the current situation too but I still think it’s funny somehow we just never bought into serializers for html. Maybe the idea was before its time? I’m sure you’d have no such parsing problems in the wild if you introduced JTML now. Clearly people know how to serialize.

munificent 9mo ago
> For some reason generating a valid wire format seems to be no problem for people when it comes to json. The "some reason" is that JSON is most often produced by code, written by programmers. That's not the case for HTML which is often hand-authored directly by non-programmer users. Most people on Earth literally don't know what the word "syntax" means, much less feel comfortable dealing with syntax errors in text files.
- theamk 9mo ago
  "Most people on Earth" can't write HTML. And if one doesn't know what the word "syntax" means, they are not going to have much success writing HTML - after all, ignoring the errors does not make them go away. Instead, it seems your choices are either: (1) errors cause random changes on page, such as text squishing into small box, or whole paragraphs missing, or random words appearing on page, or style being applied to wrong text etc... (2) errors cause page to fail loading with no text shown at all Both of those are pretty bad, but I wish web would go with (2) instead of (1). Because in that case, we'd have whole ecosystem of tooling appear... Imagine "auto fixup" feature in web servers which "fixes up" bad HTML into good one. For basic users, it looks the same as today. But instead of fixup and guesswork being done by users' browsers (which author has no control of) it would be done by author's webhosts (which author can upgrade or not upgrade as needed...)
  - munificent 9mo ago
    You are vastly underestimating how much of the web was and is successfully authored by non-technical people who barely understand the difference between a word processor and a text editor but are able to cobble together enough HTML tags that it mostly looks like they want and lets them share their knowledge with the rest of the world.

munificent 9mo ago

> For some reason generating a valid wire format seems to be no problem for people when it comes to json. The "some reason" is that JSON is most often produced by code, written by programmers. That's not the case for HTML which is often hand-authored directly by non-programmer users. Most people on Earth literally don't know what the word "syntax" means, much less feel comfortable dealing with syntax errors in text files.

theamk 9mo ago
"Most people on Earth" can't write HTML. And if one doesn't know what the word "syntax" means, they are not going to have much success writing HTML - after all, ignoring the errors does not make them go away. Instead, it seems your choices are either: (1) errors cause random changes on page, such as text squishing into small box, or whole paragraphs missing, or random words appearing on page, or style being applied to wrong text etc... (2) errors cause page to fail loading with no text shown at all Both of those are pretty bad, but I wish web would go with (2) instead of (1). Because in that case, we'd have whole ecosystem of tooling appear... Imagine "auto fixup" feature in web servers which "fixes up" bad HTML into good one. For basic users, it looks the same as today. But instead of fixup and guesswork being done by users' browsers (which author has no control of) it would be done by author's webhosts (which author can upgrade or not upgrade as needed...)
- munificent 9mo ago
  You are vastly underestimating how much of the web was and is successfully authored by non-technical people who barely understand the difference between a word processor and a text editor but are able to cobble together enough HTML tags that it mostly looks like they want and lets them share their knowledge with the rest of the world.