> they were not strictly XHTML compliant The vast majority were not strictly XHTML compliant, but whatever the figure was, I'd imagine it wasn't too different

> they were not strictly XHTML compliant The vast majority were not strictly XHTML compliant, but whatever the figure was, I'd imagine it wasn't too different to all the many "strictly HTML compliant" sites now (compliant according to which commit?). The point was they used XHTML, which means they could trivially choose to validate and test their XML well-formedness with built-in tools everyone had ready access to. Exposing your end-users to those conformance checks (i.e. the in-browser strict XML-parser) wasn't the only "value" offered.