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IMO that's wrong. You could write XHTML 1.0 documents that were backwards compatible to browsers that only understood HTML 4.01. XHTML2 OTOH was a convoluted m

by bhaak 7y ago

IMO that's wrong. You could write XHTML 1.0 documents that were backwards compatible to browsers that only understood HTML 4.01. XHTML2 OTOH was a convoluted mess of modular documents that couldn't get out of design hell and completely disregarded the developers of browsers. HTML5 succeeded because it was implemented by the browsers, because the same people that programmed the browsers were on board when designing HTML5.

bzbarsky 7y ago
> You could write XHTML 1.0 documents that were backwards compatible to browsers that only understood HTML 4.01. You could and a lot of people _tried_, or at least pretended to. But the vast majority of documents that tried to do this failed to actually be well-formed XML, for various reasons... In practice, even restricting parsing as XML to cases when the page was explicitly sent with the application/xhtml+xml MIME type would leave a browser with problems when sites sent non-well-formed XML with that MIME type. This was a pretty serious problem for Gecko back in the day when we attempted to push XHTML usage (e.g. by putting "application/xhtml+xml" ahead of "text/html" in the Accept header). So we stopped pushing that, since it was actively harming our users...