What to use for finding as many syntax errors as possible.

Tue Oct 11 16:00:50 EDT 2022

On Wed, 12 Oct 2022 at 05:23, Thomas Passin <list1 at tompassin.net> wrote:
>
> On 10/11/2022 3:10 AM, avi.e.gross at gmail.com wrote:
> > I see resemblances to something like how a web page is loaded and operated.
> > I mean very different but at some level not so much.
> >
> > I mean a typical web page is read in as HTML with various keyword regions
> > expected such as <BODY> ... </BODY> or <DIV ...> ... </DIV> with things
> > often cleanly nested in others. The browser makes nodes galore in some kind
> > of tree format with an assortment of objects whose attributes or methods
> > represent aspects of what it sees. The resulting treelike structure has
> > names like DOM.
>
> To bring things back to the context of the original post, actual web
> browsers are extremely tolerant of HTML syntax errors (including
> incorrect nesting of tags) in the documents they receive.  They usually
> recover silently from errors and are able to display the rest of the
> page.  Usually they manage this correctly.

Having had to debug tiny errors in HTML pages that resulted in
extremely weird behaviour, I'm not sure that I agree that they usually
manage correctly. Fundamentally, they guess, and guesswork is never
reliable.

ChrisA