Comment by spankalee
16 hours 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.
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.