gmiller - 4:27 am on Jan 13, 2001 (gmt 0)

Well, actually, HTML shouldn't really be compared to XML. Older versions of HTML are applications of SGML and the current version of HTML is an application of XML. So it'd be more accurate to compare XML to SGML.

SGML allows you more alternate ways of doing something (optional closing tags, implicit elements, etc) than XML, but most of the leniency is actually coming from the browser rather than the SGML spec.

I imagine there'll be lots of panic and relearning once automatic validation results become more common as a browser feature. iCab already displays a frowning face and offers a list of errors when dealing with invalid markup. A similar Mozilla feature is in the works as well. It'd be rather embarassing to have your users view your page and see a big "This page contains errors and may not be rendered as intended." warning.