[wheels]

The conspicuous lack of a "Server:" header inclines me to believe that that's probably not the case (most web servers set one indicating the server software and version). Here are the headers that HN sends out from an old post (20 days ago):

  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
  Cache-Control: private
  Connection: close
  Cache-Control: max-age=0

[bascule]

My favorite part of HN's headers: the lines are separated by naked LFs instead of CRLF, in violation of the HTTP spec

[divtxt]

This is common violation that everyone accepts. It's definitely done by 'bad' clients - not sure how often servers send bare LF.

(I used to telnet to port 80 for testing, and type GET / HTTP/1.0 <enter> <enter>, and that should be LF on Linux & Mac)

[bascule]

You don't have a problem with one of the most trafficked sites for programming/web startup-related news implementing HTTP incorrectly?

Do you ignore whether your HTML is valid just because the browser rendered it correctly?

[snprbob86]

Yup.

I've got real work to do. Making a validator happy is fake work.

[pilif]

By ensuring that your pages are valid, you make it ever so much more likely that you will not have to scramble around wasting time at a most inopportune time when the new version of a browser comes out which handles your non-standards compliant tag soup differently than the current version of the browser.

So, do you want to pay the price upfront when you can plan for it or afterwards when the fix must be done immediately because customers are complaining?

[snprbob86]

In my experience, I've had to scramble to fix browser compatibility issues every bit as often with 100% standards-compliant code, as I have had to with some incredibly laughably bad HTML.

I'd much rather pay the exact price later, than an inflated price now.

[bascule]

Some of us actually care about interoperability, maintainability and writing good code in general as opposed to just cowboying stuff together as quickly as possible

[Animus7]

I used to preach the same thing.

Then, working at a startup taught me that it's not black and white. Several quotes come to mind, but Voltaire's is my favorite:

"The perfect is the enemy of the good."

[SimHacker]

Why don't you bother doing your real work right the first time? As long as there's a well defined spec, you might as well follow it instead of being creative and original when it comes to implementing standards.

[marshray]

You don't know that everyone accepts it. Even if they did, it doesn't make it right.

[pufuwozu]

I fixed submitted a patch for this in the pecl_http PHP library:

https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=58442