On: Why did Alan Kay say the Internet was done well, b...

[qw]

I agree. Many underestimate how the lack of strictness helped early users. You could start with plain text and add a few <br> or maybe a <p> (wIthout end tags) to create paragraphs.

Anyone with minimal knowledge could start sharing content. If they had to pass any kind of validation, many would not have bothered. Yes it was a mess, but it helped us get enough information to reach critical levels. I would rather have a web with messy HTML than FTP servers filled with Word documents or a proprietary AOL / MSN

[KMag → qw]

The problem of broken markup would have been better solved on the server side, rather than the client side.

As a general principle, pushing denormalized data as far to the edges of the system as possible minimizes complexity of the system as a whole.