On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 7:49 PM, Nils Dagsson Moskopp <
nils@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