If you've ever tried to write a computer program, you'll know the dread of a syntax error. An errant space and your code won't compile. Miss a semi-colon and the world collapses. Don't close your brackets and watch how the computer recoils in distress.
The modern web isn't like that.
You can make your HTML as malformed as you like and the web-browser will do its best to display the page for you. I love the todepond website, but the source-code makes me break out in a cold sweat. Yet it renders just fine.
Sure, occasionally there are weird artefacts. But the web works because browsers are tolerant.
You can be crap at coding and the web still works. Yes, it takes an awful lot of effort from browser manufacturers to make "do what I mean, not what I say" a reality. But the world is better for it.
That's the crucial mistake that XHTML made. It was an attempt to bring pure syntactic rigour to the web. It had an intolerant ideology. Every document had to precisely conform to the specification. If it didn't, the page was irrevocably broken. I don't mean broken like a weird layout glitch, I mean broken like this:
The user experience of XHTML was rubbish. The disrespect shown to anyone for deviating from the One True Path made it an unwelcoming and unfriendly place. Understandably, XHTML is now a mere footnote on the web. Sure, people are free to use it if they want, but its unforgiving nature makes it nobody's first choice.
The beauty of the web as a platform is that it isn't a monoculture.
That's why it baffles me that some prominent technologists embrace hateful ideologies. I'm not going to give them any SEO-juice by linking to them, but I cannot fathom how someone can look at the beautiful diversity of the web and then declare that only pure-blooded people should live in a particular city.
How do you acknowledge that the father of the computer was a homosexual, brutally bullied by the state into suicide, and then fund groups that want to deny gay people fundamental human rights?
The ARM processor which powers the modern world was co-designed by a trans woman. When you throw slurs and denigrate people's pronouns, your ignorance and hatred does a disservice to history and drives away the next generation of talent.
History shows us that all progress comes from the meeting of diverse people, with different ideas, and different backgrounds. The notion that only a pure ethnostate can prosper is simply historically illiterate.
This isn't an academic argument over big-endian or little-endian. It isn't an ideological battle about the superiority of your favourite text editor. There's no good-natured ribbing about which desktop environment has the better design philosophy.
Denying rights to others is poison. Wishing violence on people because of their heritage is harmful to all of us.
Do we want all computing to go through the snow-white purity of Apple Computer? Have them as the one and only arbiters of what is and isn't allowed? No. That's obviously terrible for our ecosystem.
Do we want to segregate computer users so that an Android user can never connect their phone to a Windows machine, or make it impossible for Linux laptops to talk to Kodak cameras? That sort of isolation should be an anathema to us.
Why then align with people who espouse isolationism? Why gleefully cheer the violent racists who terrorise our communities? Why demean people who merely wish to exist?
The web runs on tolerance. Anyone who preaches the ideology of hate has no business here.
7 thoughts on “The Web Runs On Tolerance”
Ian Mansfield
Related - a very many years ago I worked for a Geocities clone and part of our monitoring job was dealing with customers complaining that their websites looked broken.
And 9 times out of 10 it was badly closed tables, because (either Netscape or MSie) could work out what to do and close the table for them so that the rest of the page rendered as expected by the human, and the other browser wouldn't do that and the pages looked broken.
And of course, it was our fault that the pages looked messy in one browser but not the other.
Fax Paladin
I know that in at least one case the MS web editor intentionally omitted/deleted the table close specifically so the page would only work in IE. I learned this because someone who had hosting space available took over a site I'd built in Netscape Navigator Gold (this tells you how long ago it was, though my still having a 68040 Mac when PowerPC was the norm was also a factor) and ran the pages through either Word or FrontPage.
Sam Fisher
Well said! We're witnessing a resurgence of intolerance these past few years in particular. Even among my peers there seems to be a desire to speak like they're back in an Xbox live game chat from 2001 – make fun of the trans person's voice even though they supposedly support them; call things "gay" if they don't like it; laugh when someone says they're going to call ICE on the Starbucks worker who made their drink wrong.
But if you call it out then you're the one being overly sensitive. I'm sick of it.
The Web Runs On Tolerance – Terence Eden’s Blog
Spot-on observations from Terence linking the fundamental nature of parsing in web browsers with the completely wrong-headed takes of some technologists who have built on top of the web.
| Reply to original comment on adactio.com
"History shows us that all progress comes from the meeting of diverse people, with different ideas, and different backgrounds." The web is no different.
| Reply to original comment on werd.io
Postel's Law, the robustness principle, always struck me as a solid foundation of ethics: “be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.”
And that’s quoted from the TCP spec, so quite literally core to the web!
The web runs on tolerance | Hacker News
| Reply to original comment on news.ycombinator.com
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