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Comment by ptx | Hacker News Reader

And another HN bug, I think: Comments are wrapped in "span" elements (which are inline elements) but contain "p" elements (block elements) which is not valid:

  <span class="commtext c00">...<p>...<p>...</span>

The W3C HTML validator says: "Element p not allowed as child of element span in this context."

This causes Dillo to render the text in grey from the second paragraph on.

View on HN

Thanks, I reported it too by email.

I wonder if HN sticks to the current HTML markup (which is full of validation errors!) to preserve compatibility with third-party clients that scrape and parse it?

In that case, maybe we could get a query parameter along the lines of "useValidMarkup=1" (or a user setting might be better) to produce valid HTML for the benefit of niche browsers that expect it while preserving the current (invalid but stable) markup by default.

> I wonder if HN sticks to the current HTML markup (which is full of validation errors!) to preserve compatibility with third-party clients that scrape and parse it?

I don't think so, but if it does I recommend they instead stick to the HTML (4.01 or 5) spec by default.

> In that case, maybe we could get a query parameter along the lines of useValidMarkup=1" (or a user setting might be better) to produce valid HTML for the benefit of niche browsers that expect it while preserving the current invalid but stable) markup by default.

They can guess the browser by the User-Agent and serve a "patched" version if needed (bluedwarf.top does it). But I would recommend doing against this, as it reduces the incentive for clients to get fixed and moves the responsibility to webmasters.

Fixed at HN side (thanks dang).

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