in reply to Larry vs. Joel vs. Ovid
This lead to the development of the first generation of WYSIWYG tools that did produce bad layout as well. These became popular, so the second generation of browsers decided to make sure that they could accept those. Begin vicious cycle.
Nowadays, we're still stuck in the HTML problem, and I don't think that will ever be cured. But for so-called web application or interprocess communications, we have XML. There is *no* reason not to be able to write valid XML given the large number of tools, free, commercial, compiled, interpreted, or otherwise, out there; nor is there any reason not to read in only strict XML. However, the advantage of XML as a format is that one can include excess or alternative data to the format, which client A might not completely understand but can still produce an intended result, while client B can take advantage of. But the key point here is that the XML *must* be well-formed. If one gets bad XML, what should the error be the user? Hopefully, those that have worked with HTML over the years understand that malformed XML is potentally more dangerous than malformed HTML, and will take steps to tell the user of such.
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Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com
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