I'd argue the big thing that made HTML so easy to play with was permissiveness, not the lack of explicit compilation. Perl doesn't tend to have an explicit com

I'd argue the big thing that made HTML so easy to play with was permissiveness, not the lack of explicit compilation. Perl doesn't tend to have an explicit compilation step. You could write a HTML compiler to be as permissive as HTML parsers and you wouldn't have the same frustration you had trying to get started with perl.