[microformats-discuss] Resilient File Formats

[Mark Pilgrim]

On 10/3/05, Kevin Marks <kmarks at technorati.com> wrote:
> HTML took this from SGML, and in many ways expanded it further due to
> the toleration of sloppy markup from user-agents, to the point where
> people writing parsers had a bit of tough time of it.
>
> XML was an over-reaction to this - it instituted draconian parsing by
> design, and effectively gave the green light for everyone to make up
> their own format without consideration for others at all (with
> namespaces as a figleaf to cover this, and coerce coexistence post
> hoc).

Everything Kevin said... especially the point about how draconian
error handling came to be.  See also
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/16/draconianism .  If you
poke around those original mailing list archives from 1997, you'll see
that XML was designed *precisely* to avoid "another HTML" (with
ultraliberal parsing and the nightmares contained therein).  The
decision was as controversial then as it is now; all we have to add to
the discussion now is eight years of hindsight.

--
Cheers,
-Mark