The web is built on a mountain of tech debt.

@michaelbelete2124

2 ай бұрын

Quote of the year

@vrjb100

2 ай бұрын

That's not technical debt, it's technical neglect

@PhilipAlexanderHassialis

2 ай бұрын

This is one of the first things I always say to the FE teams I manage when we form the team and start talking about the project, well not actually this, but actually "the web is held together with gum, duct tape and prayers". They don't understand it at this point, but pretty soon enough they do get it. Shenanigans ensue.

@AbstruseJoker

2 ай бұрын

Most of software. Not just the web

@DarrenJohn10X

2 ай бұрын

"...held together with gum, duct tape and prayers". They don't understand it at this point, but pretty soon enough they do get it. Shenanigans ensue." ^ Speedrun your team's "getting it" by making Theo's rant here Required Reading during their first week.

Hello Will always look like an error for me.

@TheCodeDrop

2 ай бұрын

ikr, its only something who didn't bother learning HTML first jumped straight into these JS Frameworks would do. The current implementation is really good for me, I just close everything. For self-closing tags it doesn't bother them, just one extra / to deal with. e.g.: and for "closing" closing tags, welp, I simply close them after their job is done. e.g.: meh

@Slashx92

2 ай бұрын

​@@TheCodeDropand any self-closing element that is not closed just to throw an alert to the console and done, to not break old code using amd . Everything sorted

@TheCodeDrop

2 ай бұрын

@@Slashx92 yes why not, just show a warning, it can at least be a great starting point.

@pablom8854

2 ай бұрын

looks kind of like pug which I find awesome

@Pete133

2 ай бұрын

Yeah... and it is an error if you put it in the W3C HTML validator. I don't see how it would make sense in any language to expect "Hello" to be inside the div... if the language does support self closing tags then any content after the closing slash should be outside the element... isn't that the point of a closing slash? The fact that browsers ignore the self closing slash and fix your invalid markup should never have been interpreted as some valid syntax.

13:17 "How many people are actually writing an html file?" **Looks at my personal website which uses plain html with no frameworks** Uhhhhh probably some people

@LongJourneys

2 ай бұрын

Right? I don't use frameworks unless I have to.

@illusion466

2 ай бұрын

based and react pilled

@acf2802

2 ай бұрын

No frameworks?! No frameworks to manage your frameworks? Do you even webdev?

@DavidLindes

2 ай бұрын

@@acf2802 that might depend on how one defines "webdev". Some of us have been writing HTML by hand since the mid 1990's, and, while we may use frameworks of various sorts for some things, we're quite content to hand-code HTML for other things. 🤷🏻‍♀

@dmug

2 ай бұрын

For a very very long time my personal website was just a few PHP files with includes that were filled with good ol' hand written HTML. It's now just pre-rendered NEXT.js to get around pesky full page refreshes. Nothing like having to compile your god damn site just because you changed a few words.

As someone building it’s 100% the fault of the framework creator. If you’re building a language wrapper it’s YOUR job to fully understand the details, especially the fine ones, of the language that you’re wrapping. It’ll be like building a C++ framework with a pointer object that is actually a reference under the hood.

@techobservations8238

Ай бұрын

exactly my thinking its on the Framework people to do and understand the thing they are wrapping to the extreme detail - pretier et al be damned follow the spec's and implications

@alex2143

Ай бұрын

​@@techobservations8238 counterpoint. If MOZILLA, the actual developers of one of the oldest and most respected browsers, do this wrong, then the language is wrong and needs to be fixed. That would either be a temporary annoyance now, or we're going to permanently keep having this annoyance in the future. People 200 years from now will look back and ask themselves, why didn't they just fix this.

Enters HTML, the programming language

@overwrite_oversweet

2 ай бұрын

That's not all! Introducing HTML... with Styles™! Cascading your way from context free, to more powerful models of computation! HTML+CSS, the dataflow programming language of choice!* (*among masochists)

I handwrite HTML for work. Also, my personal website doesn't use any framework, just handwritten HTML, CSS, and a tiny bit of JS.

@Barnardrab

Ай бұрын

Same here. I find that frameworks convolute code with boiler plate and makes the project more complicated.

Something about an issue being "Library does the thing it's meant to do completely wrong" is really amusing to me

If only we had a tool to show the browser what language version we’re using so it could parse accordingly… you know, like doctype and head meta tags 🙃

@RandomGeometryDashStuff

2 ай бұрын

http content-type header

@JayXdbX

2 ай бұрын

I would do my part and never use it!

@5:20 - a-TRI'-bute is a verb; A'-tri-bute is a noun.

@charliecarrot

2 ай бұрын

I try not to care, but the number of times he said it in this video was killing me 😭

@omarjohnson2450

2 ай бұрын

@@charliecarrot went and looked for these comments when i just couldnt anymore (5 minutes in)

@SandraWantsCoke

2 ай бұрын

a-tri-butÉ is French

@skillit2

2 ай бұрын

I hear people use the verb pronunciation for the noun so much, it always bumps me.

@joshuabrazile

2 ай бұрын

Oh GOD YES!!!!!! This was KILLING ME!

"If a comment could change what the code does"... May I remind you of Internet Explorer's conditional comments?

@arthurcarchi4045

2 ай бұрын

What the ... ?

@tharsis

2 ай бұрын

Also SHTML (server side includes) where you could easily embed other HTML files (as well as doing other things) without even needing a PHP backend! Just slap in and you're sorted. It even supports arbitrary execution of shell commands and echoing environment variables! XSS and user submitted content wasn't exactly a concern when SSI was introduced...

@nocclia

2 ай бұрын

html email building still has to use conditional comments for some stylings on outlook clients lol

@valdsonfrancisco8836

2 ай бұрын

JDSL (tom is a genius)

@ZipplyZane

2 ай бұрын

@@arthurcarchi4045 I mean, it kinda makes sense, assuming not all browsers are the same, and the other browsers don't have browser-specific syntax. You put the code specific to your browser in a special comment so that other browsers ignore it. A similar technique was used to allow JavaScript to work in old HTML, before all browsers had JS support. You would put your JavaScript inside of a special HTML comment. Similarly, XML doesn't like raw text strings, so SVG would put them inside of CDATA tags. Notice how it starts with

I went to MDN to see the list of self-closing (which they call Void Elements) and they indicate that the /> is invalid HTML. I clicked on embed, one of these elements and the example had the invalid />. 😂

Retrocompatibility is the best worst thing that happen in software development, that's why we have new tools each week.

@nickfarley2268

2 ай бұрын

HTML is already compatible. Self closing elements would require new tools. Why do we need this??

@proosee

2 ай бұрын

@@nickfarley2268 because we treat HTML as human-readable language, so it must be easily readable for humans as well. If that was only machine readable language (like e.g. bytecode) then you would be right.

@nickfarley2268

2 ай бұрын

@@proosee are you saying html is not human readable because you have to write instead of ? Why do we need to redefine HTML syntax so we can save 5 characters of text?

@proosee

2 ай бұрын

@@nickfarley2268 no, I didn't say that, I said that if you consider language a human-readable one then opinions of people on how confusing it is actually matter, if spec for is for most people confusing then you need to take it into account and you just disregarded it by "meh, machine can read it so it doesn't matter".

@Slashx92

2 ай бұрын

​@nickfarley2268 it's less human readable if you re-watch rhe examples with the div tag. Or this is inside Brs are not the problem

Hey, when I started writing HTML we used , so that doesn't look so bad now, does it?

We should not be requiring tooling. The power of the web is that you can get started without anything other than an editor.

Theo's "Just never write html" argument misses the point.

Just to clear up a bit of confusion with the terminology used in the article referenced in this video. There is no such thing as a "self-closing" tag in HTML (i.e SGML). They don't exist: they only exist in XML. What's being referred to in the case of e.g in HTML is not a "self closing" tag but a "standalone" tag - something completely different to a self closing tag in XML (and doesn't exist in XML). That's partly the reason for the confusion, and it's why is just as much a syntax error (in HTML, if you didn't know) as .

@RickYorgason

Ай бұрын

SGML has had self closing tags since at least the last millennium. See Annex K.3.5.1.

I was one of the XHTML proponents. But it had one huge problem on every browser that even supported it (at least it did back in the day): a single syntax error made the browser shit itself and refuse to render anything. But in my opinion they threw the baby out with the bathwater. They could have made HTML5 xml-like and xml compatible while also making it fault tolerant like it is today.

it comes from the old XHTML standard that was based on XML, we've mostly abandoned it, but it is valid XHTML to do and expect it to render properly

@msclrhd

2 ай бұрын

HTML5 has an XML serialization mode (XHTML5) when you add an tag at the start. That is in part for compatibility with XHTML, but also with XML pipelines (e.g. transforming JATS to HTML with XSLT). It's also used in various places like EPUB 2 files.

@acf2802

2 ай бұрын

Except not really because 99% of people who used XHTLM did not serve it with the "application/xhtml+xml" mime type which means it was always being parsed as HTML and relying on HTML's lackadaisical handling of syntax errors to "just work."

@DavidLindes

2 ай бұрын

the video goes into this. But, yeah, I'm finding myself wanting to start explicitly using xhtml instead of html5 from now on, and keeping (with or without the space, ideally) as being what I expect it to be.

i feel like we should not call a self closing tag but a short closing tag because is a self closing tag, the tag _closes itself_ without you needing to do anything, meanwhile divs need end tags, which you can _shorten_ in some tools to idk this is just a random brain spew but i feel like if we make a clear distinction it could make future discussions easier

@joshix833

2 ай бұрын

Yeah, for theo /> means self-closing tag even if it doesn't close right away. In HTML5 br and input are self-closing, div isn't regardless whether there's a slash.

@dminik9196

2 ай бұрын

In html, these (, , ) are not called self-closing. Technically they are called void tags.

@dminik9196

2 ай бұрын

To be even more pedantic, they are called void elements, not void tags. Shame on me for not double checking before commenting 😞

@kennethguinto4862

2 ай бұрын

you know the right way to write hr and br tags are and right? as somone says they are void elements.. will it blow your mind that tag does not need to be closed ?

You keep saying "attribute" with the verb pronunciation (emphasis on the second syllable) when you mean the noun (pronunciation should have emphasis on the first syllable). Just a heads up because it trips me up every time. Sorry to be "that guy" but I'd want someone to let me know, just like if I had something in my teeth and didn't know. Great videos!

@dumpstin

2 ай бұрын

I was just about to be that guy - thanks Reverend!

"If the guy who made the HTML ++ framework thought that this is how it worked, that's a fault of the language, not a fault of the individual." Ummm, no? It's really incumbent on the individual to know how the language works.

This video just makes me feel old since I knew this 😂

"Almost no languages support using Emojis" What is he talking about? Javascript is very much able to use them for variable names. Just not JSX...

@electra_

2 ай бұрын

At the very least in TypeScript, I get an error when trying to use emojis. At one point I was trying to write code using some custom Unicode characters and I had to make a custom parser just to reformat it (it would change the unicode characters into variable names that had bytes written out like identifier_u1234_u2345 etc, which was awful to debug of course)

@TheRealFallingFist

2 ай бұрын

@@electra_ Number one reason I'll never move on to typescript, can't use emojis. It's incredibly important to my workflow. .js files or bust.

4:30 showing zero appreciation of what was done with pre-ANSI C++ in a semi-green field environment. The web needed a decent front-end so users could actually see the value of the internet and use it. Netscape was also in competition with Microsoft, so they had to make choices and execute. Mistakes were made, but the biggest mistake was probably the rewrite. Context matters.

I still handwrite html manually, what's wrong with that?

@allesarfint

2 ай бұрын

How dare write HTML instead of... let me check... JSX

@jsmunroe

2 ай бұрын

Yeah, my documentation is just HTML and JSX hand written in Composition notebooks. My code reviewers just use red pen.

I don't like self-closing tags because it is less clear than explicitly closing.

@DavidLindes

2 ай бұрын

in what way is that less clear? (Inherently -- ignoring what things do with it for the sake of this question.) To me, is _more_ clear than , if only because I don't have to mentally make sure that the tag names are the same, I can just read one of them and see that it's self-closing. No?

@olemortensen3354

2 ай бұрын

Wait? You can self-close? I've always explicitly closed all enclosable tags. It's consistant with the XML. I work so often With XML that it's easier for me to just write code exactly as they should do. Not relying on an asumption that the computer not f*** up your purpose.

@DarrenJohn10X

2 ай бұрын

did you really want two of these??

@davidroddini1512

2 ай бұрын

Personally, I lean towards all or nothing. If not all tags can be self closing due to security concerns, then none of them should be. Be consistent.

@olemortensen3354

2 ай бұрын

@@davidroddini1512 amen to that. HTML is not the world! we can't be inconsistant in our expressions, and if it's a problem in one place it's 100%, a problem everywhere the self-enclosed tags are used.

As for YAML, it only became a superset of JSON with version 1.2, YAML 1.1 has some minor incompatibilities. What doesn't help is that there are tons of libraries that still only support 1.1, and the fact that many YAML libraries do not adhere 100% to the spec anyway. As for mistaken self-closed tags, I'd expect most mistakes involve textarea, as it's often empty.

I was a big fan of XHTML at the time. I wanted HTML parsing to be predictable and for browsers to print warnings in the console for invalid XHTML. Obviously I was on the losing side. Pragmatic concerns kept the technical debt of all this stupid HTML parsing.

@RandomGeometryDashStuff

2 ай бұрын

browsers still support xhtml so no losing

@Silverflame1

2 ай бұрын

@@RandomGeometryDashStuff That's not the point. If we would have switched to XHTML or XML we would have saved ourselves a lot of pain and suffering (it would also cause a lot of pain and suffering to transition but that would only be a period and now we're stuck with HTML).

@anoniemoss3566

2 ай бұрын

I'm glad someone else posted this too. XHTML should have been the path forward. HTML5 should be referred to as Hyper Trashcan Markup Language.

Self closing tags was a thing in XHTML, which many of us jumped to from atrocious HTML3 syntax that different browsers interpreted differently. Then HTML4 comes out, XHTML gets phased out, and we still close tags like out of habit. I'm surprised people forgot this

@Silverflame1

2 ай бұрын

XHTML is based on HTML4. Nobody seemed to be interested in it and then it faded away after HTML5 came out.

18:43 Fun fact: emojis are valid characters in selector names and variable names in CSS. 👀

@OfficialJabe

2 ай бұрын

also as keys of objects or symbols

I feel like you missed the obvious interpretation of br... br isn't an element it's an in-stream text formatting tool, it should be a character like a   perhaps.... &lnbk; (instead xml spec of )

@prozacgod

2 ай бұрын

The argument for img, is an img in an inline block element, the sorta obvious behavior would be that if an img is a block level element, then it should be able to have children, and the image would act like a inline-block element with fixed size and a background image

Another proof that React devs don't know js, html, css and in general how browser works :D

@derek123wil0

2 ай бұрын

To bake an apple pie from scratch, first invent the universe

@michakrecisz5100

2 ай бұрын

Its more like… to bake an apple pie from scratch you need to now how to use an oven.

@Gastell0

2 ай бұрын

There's really handful of people who really do though

When writing html, sometimes I omit my close tags for and just to annoy jsx-enthusiasts.

I still do it out of habit because of those XHTML days.. Self-closing the the and and it's dang hard to undo that bit of muscle memory 😭

@geoffreyvanpelt6147

Ай бұрын

I preferred xhtml. It allowed for simpler parsing rules, which allowed pages to be easily parsed on low power devices like cell phones, brail readers, printers and so on.

Theo is really brand new

I used to serve XHTML with application/xhtml+xml, except when the user agent was IE7 or lower, cause it would just render the XML as text file.

Good video, I would add that self closing tags can be dangerous doors for threat actors. I like closing my tags cause I like a sense of symmetry to it for security and aesthetics.

In HTML 6 you'd be able to write to force self close without breaking compatibility

Btw. Swift supports emoji characters in variable, function, and class names

@rickhackro

2 ай бұрын

I think Julia do that as well

@CatFace8885

2 ай бұрын

I honestly don't see the point. I don't need my variable names to be cute with emojis everywhere. If anything, I think having them in variable names will make it harder to actually use that variable in the first place. I'm glad other languages don't support that.

@rickhackro

2 ай бұрын

@@CatFace8885 Julia is designed to solve math problems, and for this is very nice for a language to support math related symbols. And Julia does it very nicely. Not emojis per say

@rickhackro

2 ай бұрын

@@CatFace8885 different languages, different purposes

@UnraveledMnd

2 ай бұрын

PHP supports it too, funnily enough.

I do not like writing /> in HTML. HTML and XML are and always were 2 different languages. HTML was built on top of SGML, not XML. And XHTML is practically dead (and probably a bad idea to start with). HTML is a language to write hypertext, and tags are called tags not as a coincidence, but because they are things you add in a text to structure it, it was not designed to structure data. If you see like them, it make perfectly sense that some elements are self-closing and some other are not, like in LaTeX (for example), the principle is very similar (you have tags that produce an immediate effect, and others that affect what is next, and these you can wrap in brackets to have them apply to more stuff). Closing tags are confusing to the user, why the user shall write something like ? It makes no sense. It also creates confusion, because the user then discovers that is not a valid syntax. Better avoid confusion, and treat XML and HTML as two separate languages, with they own rules. Beside that, it's just faster to avoid typing one useless character, and you transmit 1 byte less on the network (that multiplied for all the in your page, for all the requests made to load a document, can add up to several traffic saved.

@sweetshit4931

2 ай бұрын

XML is an ISO-compliant subset of SGML

@tabularasa0606

2 ай бұрын

html should just be fixed.

@briankarcher8338

2 ай бұрын

used to throw me for a loop. All I wanted to do was include an external js file. And simply does not work. It drove me nuts.

With every video I realise Theo knows React, but not frontend. Backend devs raised on JSX are just now learning the basics.

HTML5 specs are like 20 years old now and since day one of it's "official" release I never used etc. syntax again. Never understood why anyone would still do that. Funny that many people got confused about self closing tags just because some folks couldn't stop that habit :-)

@Gastell0

2 ай бұрын

If it worked in X/HTML, but doesn't in HTML5, then maybe it shouldn't have been called HTML5 but SGML5 instead so people wouldn't assume it's compatible.

Fault-tolerance is a foundational design principle of the web - everything from network protocols to CSS and HTML parsing and parts of JavaScript. BSOD on an HTML syntax error is what the web would have got with Microsoft-style thinking. Thank you to every early web pioneer who pushed hard for an open and fault-tolerant platform!

I may be missing something, but as I started waaaay back when html started, I know the , , etc is a single tag and not an open/close set of tags * I learned that some tags were single, some had open/close * when came out I never assumed any thing other than a single tag that represented itself as a single tag for human reference (xml aside) * Seeing does not make me thing it means , it makes me thing its a single tag and not an open/close tag

I think code indentation is a good analogy for self-closing tags. In some languages, indentation matters. In others, it's completely cosmetic. In languages where it's cosmetic, it's possible to indent incorrectly and confuse yourself. But that doesn't mean it's not useful to have. Also, I don't want emojis in my code, because the emoji picker in Windows doesn't work right when I'm in an RDP session.

It's time to introduce: HTML6 Where closing tags actually work. That, or a keyword or something, that similar to an tag would treat the contents as foreign code and therefore honor the />

the first few seconds hurt me physically

I stumbled upon this github discussion myself a few days ago. It wasn't Rich who reported this btw, but a good that it's being discussed...

that's because when the parser checks the content the img, video, , etc are pointers to resources and not the resource itself. while div, p, etc are not pointers but wrappers for the content. When you write the text in a you will have the resource shipped with the bundle... if was self-closing means that the text was coming from a text file located elsewhere and not with the .html

In 12:39 in my opinion the prettier formatter should follow the html parser when formatting html, self closing tags in list turn from opening tags and closing tags to self closing, and other tags turn into auto closed, with the exception of foreign elements hierarchies like embedded svg and MathMl.

@spicybaguette7706

2 ай бұрын

I feel like linters should also include this as a standard warning/error, at least when using and alike

There are no self-closing tags in HTML, so I never used them. Good for you, the svelte guy and all the people finding out about this.

I'm sorry, what lie? You mean misconception?

I feel like your video is trying to convince me to just get rid of all the self-closing tags, I've been doing for years. :-)

To be fair, when I was a teen a long time ago, having the browser be so forgiving actually helped me learn HTML. Hey guess what, that move led me into my career. So there is a point for it to be more forgiving in the past. Also, I guess it's easier to parse when tags themselves defined if they were self closing or not. Could very well be an "at that time, it was a fair idea" thing.

The only reason why I’d use this, would be in some kind of: And self closing would mean for me that it is the beginning and the end of this object. It has no innerHTML.

Awesome! So happy you acknowledge that HTML exists! 🎉

An ideal opportunity to dump JS too. So rendering outside the or for fun?

Self-closing only applies to inline tags without an explicit closing tag (like img and br). For blocks, everything after the tag is included inside it until it runs into the next opening block-style tag.

React bug brains are a hell of a drug 😉

I like to do `` because the first div is passing the baton to the closing tag, and look you can see the closing tag got it Edit: I read the issue posted by Rich and his main concern is about copy and pasting Svelte into HTML and not HTML into Svelte, people consistently miunderstood him. While Svelte adds language features, if you delete the Svelte parts you should be able to paste it into HTML and be the same. In that case it makes sense. They seem to be leaning towards warning people against self closing tags for tags that don't self close, and then later making it error. I think it seems reasonable, and that the disagreement comes from people misunderstanding the direction of code. Nobody is actually writing `` in HTML to cause a problem in Svelte, but people are using `` in Svelte to cause a problem in HTML. While I don't see it being a realistic error, and that it would be better for browsers to fix it, it's fair enough to be consistent with the older format.

@adtc

2 ай бұрын

Why would anyone copy-paste Svelte into HTML?

What, one can't use emoji in JS ? Even with all those transpiling layers

@TheRealFallingFist

2 ай бұрын

Yes you can. Just not in JSX. He would have shut himself up real quick if he tried it in a .js document lol

I don't care what Svelte is, but means , because the point is I'm NOT writing HTML. I'm writing a non-HTML something that only looks like HTML will eventually _become_ HTML and I expect the framework to handle it correctly to generate the HTML I expect, NOT the incorrect HTML it thinks is compliant with my non-HTML thing. If I wanted Hello. I would NOT write Hello. Because that's just stupid. I would read that and understand it to be Hello. Who wouldn't? The fact that it would be interpreted _IN_ HTML as Hello is **IRRELEVANT**. Because I'm NOT writing HTML. I'm writing a non-HTML something that will eventually become HTML. And I expect my non-HTML to do what I think it does, not what someone else think it does. Why is this even a debate? It's stupidly obvious.

Btw, with Vue templates, starting from: I'm rendered outside after rendering I'm rendered outside input We get: I'm rendered outside after rendering I'm rendered outside input Thumbs up for rendered as IMHO thumbs up for forbidding non-self-closing , ...

Biggest pain in the ass is conditionally self-closing tags like

you can define variables and stuff as emojis in python and swift (maybe others but idk)

Self-closing tags are a construct coming from XML / XHTML. In HTML 5, many tags either don't need a closing tag depending on their placement, or simply don't *HAVE* a closing tag (and adding one would be an error), like , ... EDIT: posted that at the start of the video, glad the video got it right too. "self-closing tags" are not a HTML syntax, but it's a fine syntax to have for superset language which parse your markup and support it, such as jsx / angular / w/e. EDIT 2: The point about "faster to parse" is valid, and the counter-argument itself is invalid. An XML parser simply have no notion of "some elements are self-closing". The XML parser know that an element is closed specifically due to either the "/" at the end of the tag, or when reaching a closing tag. Not having a notion of "self-closing elements", it never try to find if the element name is inside a list of self-closing elements; it doesn't have to care at all about the name of the element, no matter what it is, for parsing purposes (although it obviously need to do so when validating against the schema, but you don't have to necessarily validate against the schema when you parse the document)

18:52 - you might like ruby, then. ;) Here's an actual session log from an irb ("interactive ruby" -- ruby's way of getting a REPL) session I just did, just for fun: irb(main):001:0> « = 3 => 3 irb(main):002:0> » = 5 => 5 irb(main):003:0> «+» => 8 Perhaps it would have been better to use emoji than those symbols, but, I know how to type those, and somehow thought it created an amusing final expression.

Just in time for my F5

It's time for HTML 6

I once copied some JSX to HTML, only to have the strangest error. I spent sooo long debugging nested div issues because of this.

I ran into a lot of these things in the late 90s. At which point I learned that HTML and XML are kissing cousins in that they both derive from SGML - the grammar says so. And then committees took over and we ended up with the web version of some of the math conventions we have learned to live with. +1 for the kudos to the browser vendors making the web fault tolerant and self-healing. Even though some of the design decisions leave us scratching our heads. -1 for the slam on Netscape. For many years they were the only game in town. Not only browser, but server - which was arguably more important. The first web server (with promptly added support for Java Servlets / Applets - yeah, they were bad but innovative) with enterprise support. The first commercial web server I worked with was Netscape's on HP/UX circa 1998. The web would not have grown as fast without Netscape the company - full stop. The question in my mind, is if we could re-invent the browser today; what would it look like? And what tech do we need? Think mobile, Web Assembly, etc. None of those things were even thought of back then

Thank goodness I came across this video before I discovered self closing tags

I also have written a JavaScript framework and also require the empty tags to be closed. Simply because the framework code becomes less complex

Regarding its faster, that depends on implementation. I could see an alternative approach: Sees BR - Identifies it as a BR tag. Sees /> - closes tag. Moves on. Vs Sees BR - Identifies it as a BR tag. See / - Ignores it. See > - Closes tag. Checks if it is in the list of elements that can't have children and because of that self-closes. The article seems to just ignore this possibility and think the only way it could do it is if it ignores the slash and then checks anyway, but that is not the only case.

WOW! I didn't know that a simple is such a naughty little bugger! It does different things, depending if it is inside of (it works in "foreign content" mode) -> produces empty div. Not inside of -> it produces div with the children, that are right next to the !

I did not know people didn't know divs can't be self closing. I actually specifically test that in frameworks I am using (at the time of when I could use it) just to know how it is handled

@marioprawirosudiro7301

2 ай бұрын

True. Divs are used for structure and allows nesting, so shouldn't it be obvious that it has a closing tag?

@xelspeth

2 ай бұрын

@@marioprawirosudiro7301 I digress with your statement, self closing divs can be useful i.e. when you fill them later with js so it does make sense for them to sometimes be self-closing

@marioprawirosudiro7301

2 ай бұрын

@@xelspeth By that, did you mean putting script inside of a div, or did you mean dynamically populate the div later on? I still think they shouldn't be self-closing either way. Not even for readability - nothing says "empty div" that seeing the closing div tag _right after_ the opening tag with nothing in between.

@xelspeth

2 ай бұрын

@@marioprawirosudiro7301 I meant dynamically populating the div later on. Apart from that I don't think is more explicit than a self closing would be. For me it's the same as function() {} vs () => {}*. Just shorter and simpler for the same* *obv "this" is different in anonymous and arrow function but that's besides the point here

@marioprawirosudiro7301

2 ай бұрын

@@xelspeth Well, in that case it becomes a matter of personal taste. For me, just looks like a malformed div at first glance.

The amount of lavaflows in the web is definitely annoying as fsck. I would prefer to adopt some kind of XML standard which uses the old XHTML "strict"/"transitional" or "relaxed" DTDs to deal with webpages that would otherwise generate parsing errors. This is just another reason why I hate coding crap for the web. All the hidden "gotcha" side effects that even the "experts" / "creators" don't know about themselves. Ugh.

@DarrenJohn10X

2 ай бұрын

I really like that, "lavaflows". Instantly makes sense, like "footguns".

@ArchaeanDragon

2 ай бұрын

@@DarrenJohn10X It's a commonly-used software development term -- unfortunately. :) It usually refers to code or design that was done in a haphazard or expedient way (the "flow" part), and has since hardened into an unchangeable standard. Also can refer to multiple layers of the same thing, since you can't change the "hardened" mess below, you just pave over it with more lava. :P

Personally, I think we should be embracing xHTML more. Browsers didn't abandon it. It's still works. It's web developers that abandoned it, because they didn't want to risk displaying parsing errors when their buggy templating systems rendered the page wrong.

@Denominus

6 күн бұрын

xHTML is the only version of HTML that operates the way people expect it to. I find the parsing errors “issue” to be overblown, as you opt into it and you’d want to know during dev if you are serving broken XML (HTML). That’s how everything else works.

But then i had a very good idea. I closed my tags myself. See, closing my tags myself gave me a whole new perspective in coding and i was able to see skills that i couldve not see before.

@theblckbird

2 ай бұрын

nooooooooooo...

@lts0703

2 ай бұрын

Is this a Kanadian/Seawattgaming reference?

@neirenoir

2 ай бұрын

I wasn't expecting to find that meme here, of all places.

@Spiderfffun

2 ай бұрын

@@lts0703 I saw that too, really good one lol

@emireri2387

2 ай бұрын

@@lts0703 Yes.

laughed so hard when you say its been so old since html5 ... i feel the same ... haha

As someone who has been using pug for the last 5 years, I can't relate to anything here mattering

Weird you mention pure html, where I still code sometimes. IMHO I don't mind self closing tag but the spec or how it is treated should be different to prevent errors. Like A.) If you use self closing tag like this ... this should give you an error or warning B.) If you make a not self closing tag close like this this should turn to a locked tag. Locked tag because you cannot add children to it. C.) In relation to B all React component should be allowed to be a locked tag too. So this should be allowed but treated as locked tag. You can also use this .... but treated as open Because sometimes you want to lock the component, sometimes you don't. That's my opinion.

when i was still in college the first programming language i learned was c, then c++, then c# i think of semicolon as the period in a phrase or a sentence which indicates the end of a line which is logical. every start should have and end that's for me. even with javascript even if it's a javascript one-liner i still put semicolon at the end of each line of code. it's a preference but my rule of thumb is to treat each line of code like a phrase or a sentence which should have a period at the end.

I've been around long enough to have watched the whole thing play out. And while I understand your position, I'm angry at our industry for causing the problem in the first place. The idea of didn't come out of a misunderstanding of HTML. It was deliberately pushed in tutorials as a way of "preparing" everyone for XHTML. Except that XHTML never came and a whole generation of developers has no idea why what they're doing is wrong.

It just is so mind boggling that we had a bunch of browsers and no html parser spec for years

How about content wrapping html elements is the way to go? Hello! That would be great! Fits the whole HTML CSS JS trio well.

I agree with whatever formatter i happen to have installed on VS code this week.

I don't know how anyone who knows html wouldn't know this. I'm not usually the guy to say that, but...

Sorry, no. When I write Hello, I don't want it to suddenly become Hello. If Prettier is going to do something, it should make it Hello, because that's my expectation. And if it is not, then I can correct that by actually moving Hello inside.

In 2000 till 2010 i read a lot of w3c, see the rise and fall of xhtml, people that like xhtml was strict, but also other people that like html5 wasnt strict. For me it was a period where i learn s lot about the markup languages. I build a lot from scratch and without frameworks, and all my site are valid markup. I think a lot of frontend developers have hard times to build without a framework, just with html and css. I like to build without frameworks.

Maybe XAML was the better UI markup language after all

Angular 16 supports self-closing tags for component elements in the template :)

I've been crying myself to sleep every night since I transitioned into web development...

Never touched JSX before, so I was pretty aware of the weird conventions that XHTML left behind. Very interesting how this affects front end frameworks. I personally agree with Rich Harris -- it's better to be simple than to be convenient. Edit: Replaced 2nd "JSX" with "front end frameworks"

@Luxalpa

2 ай бұрын

but that's the opposite of simple. It means that the syntax cannot be parsed without knowing which elements are self-closing and which aren't. That means it's not backwards compatible and it means it cannot be parsed generically - for example for the purpose of extension.

@hamm8934

2 ай бұрын

@@Luxalpaabstracting away from the standard is not simpler. This is basic html knowledge. We can agree to disagree

@spicybaguette7706

2 ай бұрын

So here's the thing, JSX is very much not like HTML. It gets compiled to a bunch of React.createElement calls (If you're using React). This also kind of decouples the element kinds from the self-closingness, which would be a mess to deal with in typescripts type system (for TSX). And every time the spec would add a new HTML element, you'd need to update the JSX parser itself. In this way, the JSX spec is kind of decoupled from the HTML spec, which I believe is a good thing. In case of Svelte I can understand this, because, as Rich said, it's a superset of HTML. JSX is not a superset of HTML, it is a superset of XML and doesn't even compile to HTML (unless you use something like SolidJS, which compiles them to HTML templates)

@spicybaguette7706

2 ай бұрын

@@hamm8934 In most cases, it doesn't even compile to HTML. It's not an abstraction of HTML, it's an abstraction of the (virtual) DOM that looks like HTML

@hamm8934

2 ай бұрын

@@spicybaguette7706 its an abstraction of knowledge leading to many of the fundamental misunderstands devs have with html vs jsx and xml

whaaaat, even vscode auto-fills with i would never know that

Would have been nice to discuss how html linters handle this

In HTML 4 and 4.01 (which were strictly based on SGML), it was actually valid to write '

I was that one guy that served XHTML as application/xhtml+xml, but I also still had to support IE back then, so I used content negotiation and even some browser sniffing. 😂

18:31 Swift supports emojis in code, you can use emojis as var names.

I have never self-closed a div because I always thought it was invalid.