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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • “readability” is subjective. much like how there is no objective definition of “clean code”. i am not arguing that either option is more generally “readable”, i am insisting that people use a common standard regardless of your opinion on it. a bad convention is better than no convention. i dont personally like a lot of syntax conventions in languages, whether that be non-4-space indenting, curly braces on a new line, or early-declared variables. but i follow these conventions for the sake of consistency within a codebase or language, simplicity on linter/formatter choice, and not muddling up the diffs for every file.

    if you want to use <br/> in a personal codebase, no-one is stopping you. i personally used to override every formatter to use 2-space indenting for example. but know that there is an official best practice, which you are not following. if you work in a shared codebase then PLEASE just follow whatever convention they have decided on, for the sake of everyone’s sanity.




  • lseif@sopuli.xyztoProgrammer Humor@programming.dev<br>
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    4 months ago

    An explanation of this problem can be found on the official W3C HTML validator wiki.

    HTML parsers only allow this to stop pages breaking when developers make mistakes; see this Computerphile video. ‘Able to be parsed correctly’ is not the soul criterion for it a syntax being preferred, otherwise we would all leave our <p> elements unclosed.

    Yes, it is not “incorrect” to write <br/>, but it is widely considered bad practice. For one, it makes it inconsistent with XML. Linters will often even “correct” this for you.

    I personally find the official style (<br>) to be more readable, but this is a matter of personal opinion. Oh, and I used to have the same stance as you, but I also used to think that Python’s whitespace-based syntax was superior…

    At the end of the day, regardless of anyone’s opinion, we should come to SOME consensus…and considering that W3C already endorses <br>, we should use this style.