First: please don't editorialize in the title. The "Got to see this" smacks of other places I will not mention.<p>Second: this is not at all interesting. The person asks a sensible question and then gets some ridiculous replies.<p>Third: it made me remember my spat with ESR about HTML parsing: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=923775" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=923775</a> and now I feel sad.
Some person explained that HTML is a Chomsky type 2 grammar and regular expressions are a Chomsky type 3 grammar, and provided this link: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy</a><p>Can anyone here provide a link that makes the discussion of these typed grammars available to laymen?
For more discussion (of a blog-post about the answer by Atwood), see here: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944673" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944673</a>
Ehm, I wonder a bit, the discussions always goes that HTML is not regular. The poster though asked to just match any open tags. The language of HTML tags clearly is regular, isn't it?
The revisions for it are pretty cool too:
<a href="http://stackoverflow.com/posts/1732454/revisions" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/posts/1732454/revisions</a><p>Someone slightly not getting the joke edited it out on the basis of it being troll/rambling, then someone put it all back. The nice bit... the actual point is emphasised as a result.