Comment by maratc 2 days ago
Just to remind you that <bold> <italic> text </bold> </italic> [0] that has been working for ages in every browser ever, is NOT a valid XHTML, and should be rejected by GP's proposal.
I, for one, is kinda happy that XHTML is dead.
[0]: By <bold> I mean <b> and by <italic> I mean <i>, and the reason it's not valid HTML is that the order of closing is not reverse of the order of opening as it should properly be.
It’s totally valid XHTML, just not recognized.
XHTML allows you to use XML and <bold> <italic> are just XML nodes with no schema. The correct form has been and will always be <b> and <i>. Since the beginning.
Ooooo… now we’re talking. Sloppy HTML that closes a tag out of order or just declared out of order? Or rendering bugs when bold is before italic? It’s why XHTML should have been standard. Just dump, error out, make the developer fix it.
But the problem here is that our nice programmer-brained mental model does not match the actual requirements of text.
Unless you know about tree structures, it doesn’t make sense to the average person why you would have to stop and then restart a span of formatting options just because an unrelated attribute changed.
And that’s why XHTML failed - HTML is human-writable.
Out of order closure should definitely error out with an “unclosed italic tag detected at line:…” error.
> It’s totally valid XHTML, just not recognized.
Am I right in assuming that even you didn't notice the problem the first time you looked at it?
> Out of order closure should definitely error out
Hitchens's razor: "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
That caused plenty of incompatibilities in the past. At one point, Internet Explorer would parse that and end up with something that wasn’t even a tree.
HTML is not a set of instructions that you follow. It’s a terrible format if you treat it that way.