In reply to a post on github.com

cweiske @pfefferle demanding strictly ordered + laid out HTML makes things easier for consumers at the expense of publishers, which is a known anti-pattern. We should optimise for ease of publishing.

Also, many implementations are already parsing the target HTML for reply-contexts (e.g. Aaron Parecki (example), @jschweinsberg (example) and myself (example)), demonstrating that parsing HTML is not a significant barrier.

updated: