[preseinger]

you can't ignore ux stuff like this in a protocol that's meant for general use

something like duplicating info in closing tags in XML (which applies to every element) isn't really comparable to stuff like having to escape certain characters in JSON strings (which applies only to the values use those things)

perfect is the enemy of the good, and the good is the metric

[hot_gril]

Don't you also have to escape stuff in XML? Like &gt, which is even worse.

[taeric]

Yes, though many languages have lenient parsers. Most browser parsers, for example, will probably only be lenient if parsing "HTML."

    new XMLSerializer().serializeToString(new DOMParser().parseFromString("<a>hello < </a>", "text/html")) 

The above in my console does as expected there. And again, entities are a very dangerous part of XML and friends.

You are correct that if you tell it that that is xml, the browser will throw it back at you. Just as the JSON parser will barf on JSON.parse("{'test':'value'}").

[preseinger]

per specifications, json parsing is not lenient, html parsing is lenient

[taeric]

Right, and amusingly, more than a few json parsers are very lenient in this. That or folks abandon ship fairly quickly and go for another spec that is far more friendly.

[preseinger]

well json definitely does not accept `{'test':'value'}` as valid input

any parser that behaves otherwise is pretty clearly buggy

json has many problems but parsing ambiguity is not really one of them

[taeric]

Me thinks you have never looked at the field. I'd as soon declare csv is an error free format. Only true if you ignore the proliferation of applications that get it wrong. In subtle ways, often. Still wrong.

[goto11]

To be pedantic, html parsing is not lenient, it is unambiguously specified.

[preseinger]

if that were true then browsers would refuse to render text/html responses that didn't include a closing </html> tag, i guess

[goto11]

No, because the closing </html> tag can be omitted according to the current HTML spec. See https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#optional-tags