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by tracker1 4490 days ago
I think portions of it were wide availability of web browsers, combined with the explosive adoption rates of internet usage... as time moved forward, entrenchment of the existing sites (and their quirks) got buried in...

If we'd started with xml compatible markup (all tags must close in order), and no browsers supported a quirks mode... we'd have much cleaner web browser engines and a much more usable web today.

I think that JS has a few quirks as well... so does CSS.. JS and CSS came after HTML, and even then have grown/distorted a bit. XHTML broke too many things, so we went pragmatic with HTML5. Just the same, no "new wheel" will get adopted in this space whole-sale. People have ditched XHTML and run back to HTML5.

I think a lot of things could be better, and will get better... so long as there are billions of pages/sites out there as-is, quirks mode browsers aren't going away.
1 comments
aboodman 4490 days ago
well-formedness? _that's_ the problem with the web? Not slow performance? Not no realistic offline story? Not a loosely-typed, dynamic language? Well-formedness.

Sigh.

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tracker1 4489 days ago
How much of a browser's time is spent in JS vs. rendering? How much overhead is spent of parsing/rendering? JS isn't even 25% of overhead in most sites, or even dynamic applications. Rendering of reflows, and other UI elements is. Understanding this in the scope of JS is important, as this is where it gets triggered. Hell, having something like AngularJS out of the box in the browser earlier on would have helped a lot.

Just the same, it started with well-formedness being loose, and continued from there.

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aboodman 4489 days ago
Sure, slow rendering/layout/performance would be a perfectly reasonable complaint about the web platform.

The well-formedness thing is, sorry to be blunt, a totally crazy thing to complain about.

Every single platform that has any popularity introduces rough edges like this over time. It's impossible not to because every single bug that introduces relaxations gets baked in as content comes to rely on it. It is impossible to ever remove those relaxations, and really, it's totally fine.

There is a cost to lack of well-formedness, but on the list of problems with the web it is waaaaay waaaay down there.

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