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Comment by picomancer | Hacker News Reader

> HTML is built around intentionally ignoring malformed input

To elaborate: In the very early days, HTML was often written by hand. Part of the early vision of the web was that anybody could write HTML and publish content.

It was thought that allowing malformed HTML to result in a completely blank page or an error message would be too unfriendly for less technical users.

In those early pre-CSS pre-JavaScript days, HTML was more like bbcode, Markdown, or RST today. It's interesting that AFAIK those languages don't have a notion of malformed input -- there is no movement to tighten the bolts on Markdown in the way that XHTML attempted to tighten the bolts on HTML.

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Surely "ye olden HTML days" aren't that far back that we should be talking about them in past tense?

I just had a conversation with an iPhone repair guy. He asked me to help him fix a centering problem in his website. So he pulled up the HTML, and it was just awful. Table-based layout, broken tags... But it worked, and I taught him about the <center> tag. He gave me a discount on my repair.

Malformed HTML input is still very much alive and well, and necessary for non-technical people.

<center> is deprecated in HTML5. Unfortunately teaching him about margin: 0 auto and text-align: center might be a bit more complicated.

Sounds like that was the least of his HTML problems. Probably wasn't using CSS at all of he was using tables for layout.

Let he who has not used table-based layout cast the first stone ...

I remember thinking, "Wow! It even makes these stylish borders around the cells"

Oh the horror.

Table based layouts (still being used on practically every forum I frequent) weren't so bad until mobile came into the picture. With fixed sizes, they just weren't flexible. Plus the added bandwidth of sending hundreds of <td>s were non-trivial for those of us who were on a shoestring budget and had sudden influx of visitors back in the day.

Of course, now we've replaced the hundreds of <td> with hundreds of JS files instead. Problem solved!

If I remember correctly, in IE6, the table didn't load until all of the elements loaded. That's how they tought us tables were baaad.

Indeed, you do remember correctly. This was especially fun on dialup.

But it was OK because the forum was running phpBB, which would invariably be hacked/spammed, so you'd be getting a free dialer which was guaranteed increase download speeds ;)

>In the very early days, HTML was often written by hand

It's still often written by hand, but not generally by novices.

When I was younger I assumed pros used Dreamweaver.

Quite the opposite!

Pros assumed that you used Dreamweaver?

If it was more than about ten years ago, you were correct. In the late 90s and early 2000s, a majority (>50%) of professional Web developers used Dreamweaver, according to market surveys done at the time. It worked quite well when the formatting was in the HTML instead of CSS. It was essentially a GUI word processor with an HTML file format. When CSS took over the presentation role, drawing the interface like a MS-Word doc no longer really worked.

One thing I really really really find horrible in word processors is the nonseparation of content and presentation. Yes, they have paragraph styles you can apply, and hope everything you marked with that style actually changes when you change the style, but in practice it never seems to work well and the UX leaves much to be desired.

Do you have a link to one of those surveys? I just find that incredibly difficult to believe given that a) CSS had really started to take off by then (early 2000s) b) even using presentational HTML, it's much harder to work in a WYSIWYG environment when it comes to fine-grained control (which is what professionals are likely to require) than in a text editor.

Sorry, I don't have any such link, but I was in the dev tools business then, and I remember, for what it's worth.

Regarding CSS, it rose very gradually, but its rise created a slowly growing problem for Dreamweaver, resulting in the transition from then, when most pros used it for at least part of their workflow, to now, when most don't. Dreamweaver had the best WYSIWYG mode of any HTML editor at the time, and it had a pure code editor, and its big claim to fame was that you could edit in either, jump back and forth between modes, and they would (mostly) remain in sync. You'd do the rough layout visually, then tweak the details in the resulting code, then tweak a bit more visually, then add another touch of code, etc. As non-HTML components on the front end gradually became more important, people used the WYSIWYG mode less and less, gradually shifting toward straight coding, significantly reducing the value of DW's dual-mode advantage over pure code editors.

I always write it by hand, still haven't found a tool that does it better.

I think pretty much all professionals do, aside from tools like emmet, insertion of nodes at run time via JavaScript, and of course Markdown.

> there is no movement to tighten the bolts on Markdown

Oh but there was one, and it was desperately needed!

Gruber's original implementation was absolutely riddled with logical inconsistencies, outright bugs, and even an escaping vulnerability that was exploited by an XSS worm to self-replicate on Reddit.

This project originally started as a PHP transliteration of Gruber's pile of regexes, and it's early version history is a nice summary of all the warts as they were discovered (and never fixed upstream): http://michelf.ca/projects/php-markdown/classic/#version-his...

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