Turfster

Turfster

@Turfster

  • he/him

Coder, pun perpetrator
Grumpiness elemental
Hyperbole abuser

Tools programmer
Writer-wannabe
Did translations once upon a time
I contain multitudes

(TurfsterNTE off Twitter)

Trans rights
Black lives matter

Be excellent to each other

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UE4/5 Plugins on Itch
nte.itch.io/
Github
github.com/theturfster/

posts from @Turfster tagged #that is a parsing nightmare

also:
Turfster
@Turfster
ann-arcana
@ann-arcana
cactus
@cactus

<div /> is not an empty div in HTML5

saw some discussion on twitter about this blog post

and i haven't decided if i agree with the opinions but i am definitely having a hard time making my peace with this:

<input />This text is outside the input.
<input>This text is outside the input.</input>
<div>This text is inside the div.</div>
<div />This text is inside the div.
syntax re-highlighting by codehost

Why did anyone ever think this was okay? For what conceivable reason did anyone sign off on this bullshit?

I was just complaining earlier about worse-is-better, and this is the exact sort of worse that worse-is-better defends. If I let the brain worms take me and I forget that better things are possible, would I be able to rationalize bullshit like this? If I Nuance™ myself into thinking bad things are good, would I be happy?

tabatkins
@tabatkins
  1. HTML was originally (kinda) an SGML language. SGML was ridiculously over-complicated, so nobody actually implemented it properly, but it was also kinda a "formating commands" language. This whole tree structure bullshit is a modern invention, comparatively. Having null tags (those without children, like <img> and <input>) wasn't very weird.
  2. Somebody squinted really hard at SGML and invented XML from what they thought they saw. Self-closing tags (<div />) came from SGML's "short tags" feature where you could write a tag like <div/ to imply the end tag. (Note the lack of >!)
  3. XML IS THE FUTURE ALL MUST BE XML, Jake's article basically explains what went on here.
  4. When you've got a trillion documents (not exaggerating that number) in some bizarre bastard syntax, "just document what's out there" starts looking really attractive, for good reason.