Considering the number of people that can accomplish anything useful with HTML vs the number of people that can accomplish anything useful with C (or even XML), it's well in line with my expectations.
It's fairly easy to get a simpler implementation by shifting complexity from the parser to the user. But from a "total society productivity" standpoint, having a handful of developers spend a few months to implement a resilient parser is a cheap price to pay to have umpteen million people save hours of debugging for every page they create.
It's fairly easy to get a simpler implementation by shifting complexity from the parser to the user. But from a "total society productivity" standpoint, having a handful of developers spend a few months to implement a resilient parser is a cheap price to pay to have umpteen million people save hours of debugging for every page they create.