That isn't really the original issue at all, Crockford's comment is just what brought it to a boilover. The lack of semi-colons has been brought up in issue after issue on the bootstrap project. Each time it's been rejected for the same arguably poor reasoning.

Christian's post is completely spot on here. Javascript was designed to be tolerant of errors and inconsistencies as much as it could. That fact however, shouldn't be used as an excuse for advocating inconsistent coding. Not that I'm saying semi-colons are the epitome of consistent coding (I prefer Ruby myself) but that Javascript was not designed with significant whitespace in mind, rather it just has a tolerance for inconsistent and arguably erroneous syntax.

The argument here is that we shouldn't let Javascript's tolerance excuse laxness on our parts. We should know better.