Comment by dimal

Comment by dimal 2 days ago

9 replies

View on Hacker News

I was all gung ho on XHTML back in the day until I realized that a single unclosed tag in an ad or another portion of our app that I had no control over would cause the entire page to fail. The user would see nothing except a giant ugly error. And your solution of rendering the rest of the page in Times New Roman isn’t an option. Do you try to maintain any of the HTML semantics or just render plain text? If it’s plain text, that’s useless. If you’re rendering anything with any semantics, then you need to know how to parse it. You’re back where you started.

Granted, I could ensure that my code was valid XHTML, but I’m a hypermeticulous autistic weirdo, and most other people aren’t. As much as XHTML “made sense”, it was completely unworkable in reality, because most people are slobs. Sometimes, worse really is better.

markasoftware 2 days ago

if the world was all XHTML, then you wouldn't put an ad on your site that wasn't valid XHTML, the same way you wouldn't import a python library that's not valid python.

Reply View 7 replies
  • jasode 2 days ago

    >, then you wouldn't put an ad on your site that wasn't valid XHTML,

    You're overlooking how incentives and motivations work. The gp (and their employer) wants to integrate the advertisement snippet -- even with broken XHTML -- because they receive money for it.

    The semantic data ("advertiser's message") is more important than the format ("purity of perfect XHTML").

    Same incentives would happen with a jobs listing website like Monster.com. Consider that it currently has lots of red errors with incorrect HTML: https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.monster.c...

    If there was a hypothetical browser that refused to load that Monster.com webpage full of errors because it's for the users' own good and the "good of the ecosystem"... the websurfers would perceive that web browser as user-hostile and would choose another browser that would be forgiving of those errors and just load the page. Job hunters care more about the raw data of the actual job listings so they can get a paycheck rather than invalid <style> tags nested inside <div> tags.

    Those situations above are a different category (semantic_content-overrides-fileformatsyntax) than a developer trying to import a Python library with invalid syntax (fileformatsyntax-Is-The-Semantic_Content).

    EDIT reply to: >Make the advertisement block an iframe [...] If the advertiser delivers invalid XHTML code, only the advertisement won't render.

    You're proposing a "technical solution" to avoid errors instead of a "business solution" to achieve a desired monetary objective. To re-iterate, they want to render the invalid XHTML code so your idea to just not render it is the opposite of the goal.

    In other words, if rendering imperfect-HTML helps the business goal more than blanking out invalid XHTML in an iframe, that means HTML "wins" in the marketplace of ideas.

    Reply View 3 replies
    • bawolff 2 days ago

      If xhtml really took off, there would just be server side linting/html tidy. Its not that hard a problem to solve. Lots of websites already do this for user generated html, because even if an unclosed div doesnt take down the whole thing its still ugly.

      The real problem is the benefits of xhtml are largely imaginary so there isn't really a motivation to do that work.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • 1718627440 a day ago

        Or you just wouldn't create xhtml with string interpolation.

        Reply View 0 replies
    • aleph_minus_one 2 days ago

      > You're overlooking how incentives and motivations work. The gp (and their employer) wants to integrate the advertisement snippet -- even with broken XHTML -- because they receive money for it.

      Make the advertisement block an iframe with the src attribute set to the advertiser's URL. If the advertiser delivers invalid XHTML code, only the advertisement won't render.

      Reply View 0 replies
  • mikehall314 a day ago

    But all it takes in that world is for a single browser vendor to decide - hey, we will even render broken XHTML, because we would rather show something than nothing - and you’re back to square one.

    I know which I, as a user, would prefer. I want to use a browser which lets me see the website, not just a parse error. I don’t care if the code is correct.

    Reply View 0 replies
  • troupo 2 days ago

    Yes, you would be able to put an ad on your site that wasn't XHTML, because XHTML is just text parsed in the browser at runtime. And yes, that would fail, silently, or with a cryptic error

    Reply View 0 replies
easyThrowaway 20 hours ago

The most sensible option would be to just show the error for the ad part of the website.

Also, the whole argument falls apart the moment the banner has a javascript error too. Should we attempt to run malformed code just in case? Or should a browser start shipping shims and compatibility fixes for known broken websites like microsoft do for windows apps?

Reply View 0 replies