Yea this is absolutely what I meant. HTML5's complexity is a symptom of this problem.
I'm a bit worried about the authors taking this overboard and trying to redefine the URL standard with similar complexity.
I'm a bit worried about the authors taking this overboard and trying to redefine the URL standard with similar complexity.
Ouch. I feel like this is kind of unfair. XML, HTML1-4, and HTML5 all differ in how they treat Postel's law. XML rejects it at the spec level; if you send garbage to a parser it bails immediately, which is nice. HTML5 embraces Postel's law at the spec level. If you send garbage to an HTML5 parser, there's an agreed-on way to deal with it gracefully. Also nice. The problem was rather with HTML1-4, which embraced Postel's law promiscuously, at the implementation level. There were specs, but mainstream implementations largely ignored them and all handled garbage input slightly differently. This is what created the afore-mentioned clusterfuck.