[naasking]

That's not an apt analogy. A system with tight tolerances can still be flexible, we just know more precisely how it can flex and when it will break.

A better analogy would be if your construction workers didn't have standard or prescribed bolts in their design, so they just take what's lying around and hammer and weld bits together until it seemed sturdy enough. Suffice it to say, this is not a recipe that would work to build today's sky scrapers. There is considerable design and sanity checking that goes into this stuff which the web at every point completely lacked.

XHTML was a promising start in the right direction, but they unfortunately bungled it.

[maxerickson]

If you treat the browser as the skyscraper and web pages as environmental conditions, the approaches look more similar.

In that analogy, XHTML is weather control satellites.