Comment by Twisol
11 hours ago
HTML is actually a dialect of SGML. XHTML was an attempt to move to an XML-based foundation, but XML's strictness in parsing worked against it, and eventually folks just standardized how HTML parsers should interpret ill-formed HTML instead.
I do wish they at least allowed you to make any tag self closing so I can do <div class="my-element" /> without needing to include a </div>