Ted’s Wrong, Dion’s Right
Ted,
You’re technically right that HTML is not part of the Web architecture; but you’re living in dreamland if you think the Web could have succeeded with PDF, Flash, Word, or any of hundreds of other possible stricter formats.
The Web’s success depended critically on the looseness (I hesitate to call a non-programming language weakly typed) of HTML. People could open it, edit it, make mistakes, and still get good results. Plus they didn’t need any fancy payware tools to make things work. Plain text was good enough. A stricter format would not have brought the Web where it is today.
P.S. Your spam prevention code locks out blind users, much as PDF, Flash, and so forth are much less accessible to the visually impaired than plain vanilla HTML.
P.P.S. Your comment system is locking me out too, for no obvious reason so I’ll post this response on my own blog instead.
