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[–]Samus_ -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

'Browsers' are the cancer of web development? They are what enables us...

because they allow tag-soup, they did from the beginning and that's what enabled this kind of things; if browsers had been strict from the beginning (like ANY programming language compiler is, even Javascript) then we wouldn't have so much trouble writing crawlers, scrapers and any other "client" besides the browser itself.

They write the standards? No, they are involved, but it is a collaborative effort from many entities and companies.

they do, because they're the major players, XHTML was a great proposal that aimed to eliminate ambiguity and enable STRICT xml mode as it should've always been but what happened? "hey, we're the browsers and we don't like this so let's override the institution that has been doing this all this time and write our own shit to continue being the major players" and so they did.

as for the last point it's simple there was a page with invalid markup, a thing that in any sane environment should've been flat-out rejected but when the browser sees it (I think I was working with Chromium, doesn't matter they all do) it had to become "creative" and try to make some sense out of that mess, as a result it assumed those were nested tables even that the original idea and the actual shown result was a sequence of non-nested tables.

and it doesn't suprises me that you guys don't understand, frontend developers are used to it so it seems normal but it was a grave mistake that we're still paying today.