Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> I've heard people quip that browsers should be less forgiving and enforce perfection. That allowing jank makes the web somehow 'bad'. I think a perfect web would be a boring web. I certainly wouldn't be here writing were it 'perfect'. It's about making the web work, no matter what we throw at it, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

It's probably less about "perfection" than precluding non-conformance to a standard from the beginning. The tale of imperfect beginnings to standards that haunt the world for decades repeats itself ad nauseam. In short, if one is clever enough to engineer a relatively future-proof standard, then one avoids (possibly substantial) wasted developer hours.

Note: This is NOT easy and things are sometimes obvious and unforgiving in hindsight.



XHTML tried this approach, but it failed for this and other reasons.


Or maybe it failed entirely for the "other reasons", and this particular part of its design was actually right.


Well at the time, I do know that the vast majority of complaints I heard from colleagues was that it breaks too easily and wouldn't render after that.


I cant remember but I had a list of unsolvable problems that just ruled it out. I think in one instance I wanted to populate a form after it failed validation but couldn't correctly escape the value attributes.

I believe the biggest design flaw is that the data is the first document it loads. It doesn't work like that. The application should load first, then the ui logic, then the data and then you should get to load other data sets. Swap them, filter, join, merge etc You would get powerful applications with very little effort.





Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: