To this day I'm absolutely flabbergasted that XHTML didn't win out. Well-formed XML documents, rather than a best-guess soup of broken HTML, was perfect. Absolu

To this day I'm absolutely flabbergasted that XHTML didn't win out. Well-formed XML documents, rather than a best-guess soup of broken HTML, was perfect. Absolutely perfect. I sat on the edge of my seat for 2-3 years waiting for the XHTML MIME type, with clients performing strict parsing, to become the new norm. It never happened. It's extremely sad if you think about it - we couldn't handle a world where developers had to conform to a very simple level of strictness. Imagine any backend language (C, Java, PHP, etc.) allowing you to get away with vomiting up garbage code with syntax errors, and having the compiler or interpreter best-guessing your program's logic. It's unfathomable! And yet, that is exactly what we have with HTML(5). Mind-boggling, to say the least. Related aside: to this day, we still cannot write <script src="/main.js"/>. We must use <script src="/main.js"></script>. All because of a multi-decade old description of a CDATA element. Sigh.