On 13/11/2007, Virgil Ierubino virgil.ierubino@gmail.com wrote:
However, in standardising the language we'd lose the feature of it that all syntax is valid (useful, as then people can't ever be presented with error messages on their pages) so ideally the move toward standardisation would have to be accompanied by a switch to WYSIWYG editing, such that the code becomes beyond reach and is forced to be always valid.
Let's assume this would doom the endeavour.
On the point of immutable validity, it is perhaps less useful for all text to be valid than for there to be "invalid markup" error messages. Whilst the former ensures users can never really "go wrong", it is still true that bad markup will lead to results they very much didn't intend - and it seems to me more useful to give them an error message than a wildly unintended result.
Not for editing by humans. Working tag soup is a *feature*, not a *bug*. Else we'd just make everyone use perfect XML.
- d.