Comment by hnlmorg
20 hours ago
The problem with XML is that it’s horrible to manually read and write, and it takes more effort to parse too. It’s a massive spec which contains footguns (a fair few CVEs exist just because of people using XML on publicly accessible endpoints).
Now I do think there is a need for the complexity supported by XML to exist, but 99% of the time JSON or similar is good enough while being easy to work with.
That all said, XHTML was amazing. I’d have loved to see XHTML become the standard for web markup. But alas that wasn’t to be.
XHTML was too rigid - as a user agent it should try to render a document, rather than tell the user: "tough, the developer screwed up".
So XHTML lost to the much more forgiving HTML.
There was an idea to make a forgiving XML for web use cases: https://annevankesteren.nl/2007/10/xml5 but it never got traction.
I saw the rigidity of XHTML as an asset rather than a problem.
But I do agree that I’m likely in the minority of people (outside of web developers at least) that thought that way.