Why authoring HTML is still a mess

When HTML was launched it us was simple. And it worked if you got it nearly right. (that was in 1993). Now there are so many additions, scripts and so forth that it becomes impossible to re-use parts of other people’s HTML. In my past post I set a small question and to illustrate it copied some HTML from Wikipedia (using cut and paste). IT looked OK in my editor, so I posted it. When I looked at the final version in Firefox the pasted infobox had disappeared:

So I assumed it hadn’t got into the final version and blamed WordPress.
Then I looked in IE and found:

and as you can see the infobox shows up perfectly.
So we are still a long way from having decent editing and even longer from semantic editing unless we agree to collaborate and concentrate on making a small set of tools work properly. ICE (Integrated Content Environment) is starting to do that – it needs all our support.
[ARGGGH… the box has now appeared in Firefox – halfway into the succeeding post. Obviously it doesn’t show on single posts. Or it comes and goes as it feels like…]