Postel Rules OK!?

I actually wanted to write about this a while ago, but never got around to it. A recent comment on Dion Almaer’s Blog reminded me that some programmers consider HTML to be broken. Some even go so far as to say we’d be better off if we started with XHTML+CSS from the beginning.

To claim that HTML is broken is absurd, something that’s creating value for hundreds of millions of people, supports dozens of billion dollar companies is not broken by any definition I’d use. Tag Soup? Who cares?! I’ve been putting stuff on the web for more than a decade now, if I had to learn XML, namespaces, CSS, doctypes, content types, character encoding, positioning, style vs semantics … I wouldn’t be in this industry now.

Adam and Sriram say it better than I could.

HTML is today the basic building block for huge swathes of human information. ... I very much doubt that an HTML that had initially shipped as a clean layered set of content (XML, Layout rules – XSLT, and Formatting- CSS) would have had anything like the explosive uptake.

Adam Bosworth at ISCOC04

Geeks like us can’t live without something being strictly defined. We crave to know how exactly stuff works – vagueness and ambiguity is abhorred. However, let’s look at the explosion of the Web. Almost all the best designers I know learnt their design by doing ‘View->Source’. They opened up a page and seeing how the source looked like, typed out a few tags in Notepad. I remember the excitement when I first saw the output of some HTML code 5 years. Now, imagine if all I had got back was an error complaining of a tag which wasn’t closed. I might have been geeky enough to try and fix it – most other people would have abandoned their foray.

Sriram Krishnan on Adam’s talk

While I try to make my sites HTML 4.01 compliant (XHTML is a dead end), I’m not going to lose any sleep over the odd violation of the rules. Whatever works…