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But the web already contains billions of pages which do not conform to XHTML. Any browser or scraper would still have to able to parse those to be of any use. A

by olavk 9y ago

But the web already contains billions of pages which do not conform to XHTML. Any browser or scraper would still have to able to parse those to be of any use. Adding XHTML would just be an additional parser frontend, it would not simplify anything.

kuschku 9y ago
That’s not true – the WHATWG has already deprecated some HTML specs, and older HTML pages already break today. XHTML would have worked the same way – after a few years, you can deprecate the old parsers.
- olavk 9y ago
  As far as I know, WHATWG have deprecated some elements not widely used (like "isindex", "font"), but the documents using these elements will still be readable even if not exactly as the author intended. Moving to XHTML, on the other hand, would make billions of pages totally inaccessible. There are people who are now dead who have pages on the internet. These pages will never be updated.
  - hsivonen 9y ago
    font still works. isindex does not. It's extremely rare for a cross-browser HTML element to get removed but isindex is one of those.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      blink also doesn’t work anymore, and neither does marquee. Several of the frame attributes are broken as well. noscript doesn’t always work reliably depending on browser.
      - hsivonen 9y ago
        Marquee works for me in Gecko and Blink. Didn't test the other two engines.