Smerity (n):

A quote from Douglas Crockford in Coders at Work on the complexities of the web as an ill defined polyglot language:

The architecture of the Web has several languages in it - there's HTTP, there's HTML, URLs are a language, there's CSS, and there's the scripting language. They're all in there and at they can all be embedded in each other and they all have different quoting and escaping and commenting conventions. And they are not consistently implemented in all of the browsers. Some of them are not specified anywhere.

Even in the modern era this can still come back to bite you in the most unpredictable of ways.