library for rendering HTML

[Tim Tyler]

Btw HTML is now a "dead" format, which is supposed to be replaced by XHTML
(version 2.0 is in its 7th working draft). One of the main requirements of
XHTML is that it's well-formed (cfr XML well-formedness) Let's hope it
catches on quickly.

Not much chance of that happening for quite a while yet:

``Does Microsoft Internet Explorer accept the media type
application/xhtml+xml?

No. [...]''

It goes on to give a hack which will allow the documents to be
displayed using an XSLT style sheet.

 

[Monique Y. Mudama]

Quite an advantage for IE to be able to render these malformed pages
flawlessly. At one stage, almost 50% of the code of IE was aimed at
correcting crappy HTML.

Would you say that it would be an advantage for a C++ or Java compiler
to happily accept malformed code? If not, why is it good for an HTML
renderer to do so?

 

[Roedy Green]

Would you say that it would be an advantage for a C++ or Java compiler
to happily accept malformed code? If not, why is it good for an HTML
renderer to do so?

The judge is the .end user. All he cares about is does the page
render. If IE shows something legible and Opera does not, whether the
page is malformed or not, IE looks better than Opera to his eyes.

Once IE starts out on this road of rendering more and more malformed
and proprietary HTML, end users demand that competitors render this
crap as well. It lowers the overall standard of HTML on the web.

XHTML is an attempt to reverse this. A compliant browser is supposed
to refuse to render a malformed document. That way in theory if a
document renders on browser A, it should also render on browser B
without any special testing or tweaking.

With things the way they are now, you have to check every page on
every browser and every version of every browser to make sure it will
render ok.

 

[Andrew Thompson]

Would you say that it would be an advantage for a C++ or Java compiler
to happily accept malformed code? If not, why is it good for an HTML
renderer to do so?

'Advantage' is for the end user. Why should they have to care if
a web page is valid? They just want the information..

To the developer, the disadvantages outwiegh the advantages.

 

[Tim Tyler]

On 2005-09-27, Andrew Thompson penned:

Would you say that it would be an advantage for a C++ or Java compiler
to happily accept malformed code? If not, why is it good for an HTML
renderer to do so?

Because truncation is a common transmission error in web pages.

Renderers need to be able to cope with that - and to do so they
need to be able to handle incomplete pages with mismatched tags.