"I bet people would pay more attention if the browser stopped rendering on JavaScript errors or misformed HTML/CSS."
This was strongly suggested by those who fought for strict XHTML, but then Sam Ruby, who was leading the HTML5 effort, asked the question, "I find an image that I know my daughter will like. I send it to her. It is SVG. She wants to upload it to her Myspace page. However, the image won't render, because SVG is a form of XML, and Myspace is non-compliant. And yet, if I send her a JPEG or GIF image, she can upload that to Myspace."
The point was we typically embed content from one page into another page, and no one believed there would ever come a day when every page on the Web would be strict compliant. So HTML5 went in the other direction, dropping most requirements and allowing pretty much anything.
As I've written elsewhere, the fundamental problem we face is that a markup language, such as HTML, is completely unsuitable to the apps we now like to build and run over the Web. We rely on HTML to function as the GUI of TCP/IP, but it was not actually designed for that, as it was descended from SGML, and it carries with it a publishing history. What would make more sense would be use of a data format, such as JSON or EDN, which can then be given visual characteristics, without ever having to participate in one hierarchy or any one understanding of a DOM. Developers understandably complain that Java/Swing had 9 different layout options, the product of much experimentation, but having a variety of layout options does allow more flexibility of styles of building a GUI, with some approaches being simpler than what we get with the React/JS translation into HTML.
This was strongly suggested by those who fought for strict XHTML, but then Sam Ruby, who was leading the HTML5 effort, asked the question, "I find an image that I know my daughter will like. I send it to her. It is SVG. She wants to upload it to her Myspace page. However, the image won't render, because SVG is a form of XML, and Myspace is non-compliant. And yet, if I send her a JPEG or GIF image, she can upload that to Myspace."
The point was we typically embed content from one page into another page, and no one believed there would ever come a day when every page on the Web would be strict compliant. So HTML5 went in the other direction, dropping most requirements and allowing pretty much anything.
As I've written elsewhere, the fundamental problem we face is that a markup language, such as HTML, is completely unsuitable to the apps we now like to build and run over the Web. We rely on HTML to function as the GUI of TCP/IP, but it was not actually designed for that, as it was descended from SGML, and it carries with it a publishing history. What would make more sense would be use of a data format, such as JSON or EDN, which can then be given visual characteristics, without ever having to participate in one hierarchy or any one understanding of a DOM. Developers understandably complain that Java/Swing had 9 different layout options, the product of much experimentation, but having a variety of layout options does allow more flexibility of styles of building a GUI, with some approaches being simpler than what we get with the React/JS translation into HTML.