> Though it's not ideal either because those who think it's their job to evolve HTML don't bother to maintain SGML DTDs or use other long established formal methods to keep HTML readable, but believe a hard-coded and (hence necessarily) erroneous and incomplete parsing description the size of a phone book is the right tool for the job.

> a task which W3C et al seemingly weren't up to (busy with XML, XHTML

You realise XML/XHTML is actually delightfully simple to parse compared to WHATWG HTML?