[thelist] What is wrong with this site?

[Simon Willison]

Jeff Howden wrote:
> again, as evidenced by the original request, the developer doesn't always
> intend for their work to be sent as text/plain.  ie is doing its best to
> protect the user from this mistake.

"Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you produce" is 
fine for some purposes, but in web browsers it is a down right 
liability. The reason, as I touched on before, is simple: a web browser 
is a development tool. Most people adding content to the web are only 
testing it in a single browser - if that browser is silently fixing 
their mistakes for them, they'll think that their page is correct and 
will consider it a job well done. When a browser comes along that 
doesn't fix that particular mistake the site will be broken, but the 
original author will have no idea that there's a problem.

This in turn leads to a downwards spiral. These days, if you want to 
write a new web browser you have to not only implement a number of large 
W3C specifications, but you also have to reverse-engineer Internet 
Explorer's thousands of undocumented "fixes" or your browser will be 
unable to render the vast majority of the web, and no one will use it. 
It's not just bad practise, it's down right anti-competitive, and 
unfortunately the market has got to a point now where the situation is 
irreversible (browsers can't get sticter because old pages will break).

XHTML was meant to save us from this by starting anew with strict rules 
and the all important requirement that invalid pages should refuse to 
render, but unless the next version of IE (ha! there's a joke) does 
proper XML parsing on pages served with an XML doctype (as Mozilla does 
at the moment) even that will be lost.

Silently fixing mistakes is NOT an aid to developers. If you've left out 
  a closing table tag and the page fails to render (or even better fails 
with a warning message telling you you forgot to close the tag) you fix 
it, save and reload. If the browser silently fixes it for you you never 
even realise there's a problem. Can you imagine the state the world's 
software would be in if some C compilers "guessed" what you meant and 
re-added missing braces and semi-colons for you? Sure, they'd work - but 
no one who looked at the source code would know why! HTML should have 
been the same, but smart thinking by browser vendors doomed us to an 
endless cycle of undocumented "enhancements" and badly formed web pages.

</rant>

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