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by perilunar 1104 days ago
> When the W3C tried to push XHTML web devs balked at the idea that they should understand markup languages and not have syntax errors

At the time a lot of the people generating content for the web were not web developers, so HTML had to be forgiving. Most CMSes allow people to add arbitrary markup — it is far preferable for the browsers to be forgiving than to refuse to show pages if there is a syntax error.