Comment by spankalee

6 months ago

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.

2 comments

spankalee

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hnlmorg  6 months ago

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.

stickfigure  5 months ago

I doubt this is really meaningful. It's not like browsers are forgiving about malformed javascript. We live with "tough, the developer screwed up" every day.