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Personally I see saving a few characters here and there as a completely inadequate reason for making the spec less consistent. I don't think any of the things
by mkohlmyr 13y ago
Personally I see saving a few characters here and there as a completely inadequate reason for making the spec less consistent.
I don't think any of the things you mention actually make html considerably more legible or easier to write for a person. Just harder to parse for a machine.
I would rather have a strict language and have solid parsers that can thoroughly and decisively reject improper markup and help stop people from making mistakes while writing markup. Rather than trying to interpret what they really meant after the fact.
- recursive 13y agoHow many HTML parsers do you need to write on average?
- mkohlmyr 13y agoYou're only addressing half my argument. Just because we can invent the wheel once doesn't mean it's a good idea to make the problem it solves overly complicated for no good reason.
- Illotus 13y agoSo you are of the opinion that convenience is not a good reason?
- mkohlmyr 13y agoI'm of the opinion that there is nothing that much more convenient about what he was describing. And definitely not to the point where it makes a more complex specification worthwhile, whether one or a million parsers need to be written isn't really the point. There is some virtue in having a clean, consistent and well defined specification, for writing simpler parsers or just for being able to learn the language and be sure of how to parse it in your head. Fewer edge cases in specification = fewer mistakes and bugs in source. Attempting to fix mistakes and bugs after the fact by guessing what someone meant however will just make for new mistakes, hide bugs and does less to encourage a solid understanding of the language.