If you just document what already exists for the benefit of existing implementors, great, you just got Microsoft Office Open XML.
That, and nothing more, is everything that can result from such a mindset.
There is nothing you can do to change this.
Your comments are getting downvoted to hell and back because you either don't understand or are unwilling to accept this constraint.
What would you rather happen with mangled input like opening tags with no ending tag? Should the browser always try a best effort and never die with errors? Perhaps we can afford to break some things even though we can't afford a clean break?
I think you'd agree that the perfect is the enemy of the good. I'd argue that perfect backward compatibility is the enemy of good backward compatibility as well. Thoughts?
I'm unwilling to accept this is a hard constraint. It can't be that a later version should accept all inputs accepted by an earlier version. We should carve out exceptions based on what's actively used and inform the developer that what they're using is bad code. Eventually, some day if it becomes rare, we can discontinue support.
Get rid of all the backwards compatibility shit, and actually create strict, and simple standards, with no unexpected behaviour, that only parse valid documents, and where anyone can write an implementation?
Because that’s the definition of a standard.
That’s what a standard is supposed to be.
Standards, from paper standards to screws to fucking cucumber regulations are supposed to be more strict than what came before them, so anyone can easily accept only one type, and know it will work.
The WHATWG "standards" don’t fulfil the definition of standard in the least.
They are a strict superset of everything all implementers accept, making it a larger and more complicated mess with every single iteration.
So when will the WHATWG, as you say it’s now the legitimate standards body, do what it, as standards body is supposed to do, and deprecate currently used behaviour to replace it with stricter, simpler, standard behaviour?
Yes, that will break the web, but yes, it will also improve it.