“Martelada” is the Portuguese word for what browser engines have to do to deal with the Web. The Web is broken in ways no one can imagine. I recently got involved in writing a small program to clone web pages and had to deal with rudimentary manual html parsing. Did you knew that:

  1. Yahoo!’s Homepage refers to URLs in anchors without parenthesis or apostrophes just to spare a few bytes (and then they have a huge 30k banner at the same time) in the form ?

  2. Saw this on Slashdot. Instead of http://poke.w3.org/ you can just link to //poke.w3.org and your browser will understand that //=http:// ? Will work with parenthesis, apostrophes or nothing.

  3. In Javascript or CSS (a newly created standard) you can easily see url(” url(‘ or url(//this.works.com and they all work, apparently.

This may be common sense to any HTML parser developer or experienced web designer, but I was kind of shocked. And I’m sure there’s hundreds more.