Comment by defanor

Comment by defanor 2 days ago

> but what would be the benefit of having more pages fail to render?

I think those benefits are quite similar to having more programs failing to run (due to static and strong typing, other static analysis, and/or elimination of undefined behavior, for instance), or more data failing to be read (due to integrity checks and simply strict parsing): as a user, you get documents closer to valid ones (at least in the rough format), if anything at all, and additionally that discourages developers from shipping a mess. Then parsers (not just those in viewers, but anything that does processing) have a better chance to read and interpret those documents consistently, so even more things work predictably.

bazoom42 2 days ago

Sure, authoring tools should help authors avoid mistakes and produce valid content. But the browser is a tool for the consumer of content, and there is no benefit for the user if it fails to to render some existing pages.

It is like Windows jumping through hoops to support backwards compatibility even with buggy software. The interest of the customer is that the software runs.

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crote 2 days ago

> there is no benefit for the user if it fails to to render some existing pages
What if the browser renders it incorrectly? If a corrupt tag combination leads to browser X parsing "<script>" as inline text but browser Y parsing it as a script tag, that could lead to serious security issues!
Blindly guessing at the original author's intent whenever you encounter buggy content is a recipe for disaster. Sometimes it is to the user's benefit to just refuse to render it.

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- detaro 2 days ago
  
  and that's why HTML5 standardized the behavior, so both browsers will parse it the same, they just don't care if someone thinks it's "invalid" or not.
  
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hulitu 2 days ago

> Windows jumping through hoops to support backwards compatibility even with buggy software
This was, maybe, true some 10 years ago. Now even old Windows programs (paint,wordpad) do not run on newer Windows
> The interest of the customer is that the software runs
Yes, but testing is expensive and we are Agile. /s

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- pixl97 2 days ago
  
  >Now even old Windows programs (paint,wordpad) do not run on newer Windows
  Eh, that's a really weird example as those are components of the operating system that are replaced with the OS upgrade.
  
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lucketone 2 days ago

if developer accidentally left opening comment at the start of the html.
Rhetorical question: Should the browser display page even if it is commented out?
There is some bar for what is expected to work.
If all browsers would consistently error out on unclosed tags, then it would definitely force developers to close tags, it would force it become common knowledge, second nature.

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- bazoom42 20 hours ago
  
  As for your “rhetorical” question, you can find the answer in the HTML spec.
  
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detaro 2 days ago

HTML5 was the answer for the consistency part: where before browsers did different things to recover from "invalid" HTML, HTML5 standardizes it because it doesn't care about valid/invalid as much, it just describes behavior anyways.

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