The web as it exists today would have never happened in binary form. Everything that's terrible about HTML/HTTP/js such as tag soup, liberal acceptance of data, and being text-based have all been avenues to evolve the platform to it's current state.
Compiling HTML if done correctly and properly would effectively freeze the design permanently.
Backwards compatiblity is not the issue, it's the forwards compatibility that is the issue. The entire evolution of HTML is based on forward compatibility and progressive enhancement.
Many modern HTML features exist because old parsers were extremely forgiving or even buggy. Even something as simple as the HTML5 doctype isn't a valid SGML doctype expected by HTML 4 browsers. It is a hack which just happens to produce the correct results on older browsers.
Javascript used to have to be placed in HTML comments so that old browsers wouldn't display the source code as content because the earliest browsers had no concept of client side scripting.
Obviously a frozen platform is better to work on -- that's why people continually suggest such things for HTML. Make it compiled! Make it binary! The current situation is far from ideal. But if someone had done that with HTML 1.0 it would have been a lot harder to make it version 5.0.
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The web as it exists today would have never happened in binary form. Everything that's terrible about HTML/HTTP/js such as tag soup, liberal acceptance of data, and being text-based have all been avenues to evolve the platform to it's current state.
Compiling HTML if done correctly and properly would effectively freeze the design permanently.
How ? And do you mean that as a good or a bad thing ? As a bad thing, I disagree, it could still be backward compatible.
And isn't frozen platform better to work on ? Can't remember the quote about frozen water.
Backwards compatiblity is not the issue, it's the forwards compatibility that is the issue. The entire evolution of HTML is based on forward compatibility and progressive enhancement.
Many modern HTML features exist because old parsers were extremely forgiving or even buggy. Even something as simple as the HTML5 doctype isn't a valid SGML doctype expected by HTML 4 browsers. It is a hack which just happens to produce the correct results on older browsers.
Javascript used to have to be placed in HTML comments so that old browsers wouldn't display the source code as content because the earliest browsers had no concept of client side scripting.
Obviously a frozen platform is better to work on -- that's why people continually suggest such things for HTML. Make it compiled! Make it binary! The current situation is far from ideal. But if someone had done that with HTML 1.0 it would have been a lot harder to make it version 5.0.