Granted, esr's a bit of a strawman here because it's clear he rarely if ever has to parse HTML or deal with it at all, but his counter attack at John's correcti

Granted, esr's a bit of a strawman here because it's clear he rarely if ever has to parse HTML or deal with it at all, but his counter attack at John's corrections was way, way off base. Watching a programmer as prolific as esr defend hand-parsing HTML with trivially fragile regex is painful and downright surprising, but worse, he defended it with a weak and garbled argument about "semantics". There's a disconnect here.. :)