Comment by phlakaton
10 hours ago
HTML is far loosier-goosier in its syntax than XML allows. There was an attempt to nail its syntax down in the pre-HTML 5 days; that's XHTML. When HTML 5 pivoted away from that, that spelled the end of these two things ever coming together.
Really, I think you can trace a lot of the "XML is spooky old technology" mindset to the release of HTML 5. That was when XML stopped being directly relevant to the web, though of course it still lives on in many other domains and legacy web apps.
> There was an attempt to nail its syntax down in the pre-HTML 5 days; that's XHTML. When HTML 5 pivoted away from that, that spelled the end of these two things ever coming together.
Exactly the opposite; WHATWG “Living Standard” HTML (different releases of which were used as the basis for W3C HTML5, 5.1, and 5.2 before the W3C stopped doing that) includes an XML serialization as part of the spec, so now the HTML-in-XML is permanently in sync with and feature-matched with plain HTML.