On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 7:49 PM, Nils Dagsson Moskopp < n...@dieweltistgarnichtso.net> wrote:
> Often, solutions that can be considered “simple” for emitters of data > externalize costs, burdening consumers – especially when “simple” > prevents using off-the-shelf components like XML parsers (if a site > returns JSON in a case where ATOM might suffice) or DOM structures. > The creators ("emitters") of HTML are predominantly human authors, and the consumers of HTML are predominantly web browsers. It's *much* more important that the format be convenient for authors than for browsers. Also, experience showed long ago that over-normalizing data in the style of XML leads to bloated, hard to author, hard to manipulate data. Usually, data is (way) more often consumed than generated. > You're mixing up "number of times consumed" with "number of times someone writes a parser". There are an inconceivably larger number of people authoring HTML than writing HTML parsers. -- Glenn Maynard