[barrkel]

A nontechnical user, given a choice between two environments, one of which nags them pedantically over technical details, and another which displays the gist of entered content but perhaps with sometimes screwy formatting which one would win?

Word processors won out over text processors for the nontechnical user partially for this reason.

Postel's law applied to HTML let nontechnical users get things done with less impedance. It's less important now not because it was the wrong choice, but because users have moved higher up the stack to CMSes that handle formatting etc.

Consistency across browsers back then was only ever of serious concern to professionals in design or browser programming.

[tedunangst]

Writing correct HTML is not significantly harder than writing crappy HTML. Comparing it to latex vs word isn't a good analogy IMO. And wouldn't nontechnical users be using higher level HTML editors anyway? At least some bad HTML comes from lazy developers who should know better, and could have done better with a stricter tool.

[emn13]

It's not entirely trivial to write out correct HTML. In addition to properly closing tags, you need to deal with optional end tags (many get this wrong), optional start tags, the odd comment syntax, weird exceptionality wrt escaping esp. in script tags, context-dependant validity such as no block-level elements in inline elements (or nested a tags, or tags whose "type" depends on their attributes).

It's obviously easier to write than to read; but it's definitely easy to make a mistake. There's a lot of illogical cruft that's accumulated in HTML; so even a careful implementer might make a mistake (and might not detect it since most other implementations are so liberal).

[barrkel]

I'm was talking about the 90s.