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I agree with most of the article, but would strongly argue against any use of the 'robustness principle'. There have been huge security vulnerabilities because
by joosters 13y ago
I agree with most of the article, but would strongly argue against any use of the 'robustness principle'. There have been huge security vulnerabilities because systems disagree with each other about what is a valid request and response.
- skrebbel 13y agoAnd billions of money wasted because browser vendors, at some point long ago, decided to accept invalid HTML.
- enqk 13y agoand lots of experiments, new websites and happy users appeared because HTML has been accepted leniently
- pbsdp 13y agoAnd we've wasted vast mountains of money dealing with the resulting brokenness of the web. Those people would have figured out how to ship a web page; they'd just would have had so much trouble figuring out why one they shipped was't working, because the browser would have told them.
- skrebbel 13y agowould those experimental users have given up right when the browser reported "Missing </p> tag"?
- TeMPOraL 13y agoThey would probably be more encouraged and happier to develop even more because they would understand HTML, which is a simple but powerful concept of block markup, and not some random pile of characters in angle brackets.
- enqk 13y agoThat end tags were an option and not mandatory was a feature of the SGML language that HTML was based on. I'm not sure specifically if this was allowed in the description for the P tag, however I suspect it is. So this was entirely by design and probably not all that difficult to implement. That it might not be appealing to some I can understand. I suspect the creators of SGML had very different concerns. I like that HTML has a very humane interface.
- DanBC 13y ago> but would strongly argue against any use of the 'robustness principle'. It's useful for humans talking to each other. Apart from that I agree with you.