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What makes that story (in my link) so compelling to me is that it happened to people who were XHTML advocates. They were the people arguing that browsers shoul

What makes that story (in my link) so compelling to me is that it happened to people who were XHTML advocates. They were the people arguing that browsers should be strict. They were the people writing blogging software The Way It Should Be Done, to ensure maximum XHTML compliance. It was a blog entry that was specifically arguing for strict parsing that it became invalid XHTML due to a bug. If true believers can make this kind of mistake, how often will it happen to people who are just trying to get work done? People will have bugs in their code sometimes, but what should the failure mode be?

smaddox 9y ago
Yes, but if browsers were strict by default (or at least by default in dev mode), the bug in his compositing software likely would have been found and fixed much earlier, and it wouldn't have persisted into production. So again, I understand that it's nearly impossible to make the transition now, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be preferable. And there's no reason the transition couldn't still be made, but much more slowly, and perhaps without ever making the big browsers reject by default. I don't know if there are other disadvantages to XHTML, but if the strictness issue is the only one, then it seems like there would still be value in slowly transitioning over.