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A comment on W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns. Parent comment

Re:W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns by nradov on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @11:38AM (#15285590)
Parsers for valid HTML are trivially easy to write. The hard part is dealing with garbage HTML tag soup and still rendering something that looks good. Browsers have to figure out what the page author intended and work around all the content defects.
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Re:W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns by gsnedders on Wednesday September 20, 2017 @12:00AM (#15290723)
Parsers for invalid HTML are trivially easy to write: you literally just implement the spec, and that's not hard, and then you implement every major browser.
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Re:W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns by nradov on Wednesday September 20, 2017 @12:07AM (#15290767)
You're joking right? Sometimes it's hard to tell...
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Re:W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns by gsnedders on Wednesday September 20, 2017 @02:02AM (#15291175)
I'm not joking. It's not that hard. You literally pick up the spec and implement it, it's mostly just fairly boring menial work.
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Re:W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns by nradov on Wednesday September 20, 2017 @08:34AM (#15292994)
I think you misunderstood. There is no "spec" for handling all of the invalid HTML out there. That's part of what makes writing a browser so hard. It's far from being menial work.
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Re:W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns by realityking on Wednesday September 20, 2017 @11:33AM (#15294888)
AFAIK all major browsers have converged on the parsing algorithm described in the HTML5 spec.

It‘s super lenient and very messy but at least it‘s consistent.

IMHO this was one of the biggest benefits coming out of the HTML5 efforts.

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Re:W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns by gsnedders on Wednesday September 20, 2017 @09:26PM (#15299873)
Indeed. 15 years ago it was a huge amount of work reverse-engineering other browsers around parser behaviour; 10 years ago it was a huge amount of work finding where the draft spec broke sites; today it's pretty much just implementing the spec.
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