4 ms·
I think XHTML failed due to a lack of tooling. It was an attempt to force HTML into a formal "compiled" form which machines could understand. Thus what was need
by gerikson 5y ago
I think XHTML failed due to a lack of tooling. It was an attempt to force HTML into a formal "compiled" form which machines could understand. Thus what was needed to authors was to use tools to write "source code" (like Markdown) and then "compilers" to transform that into XHTML. Then you needed to be able to verify that it was correct (otherwise you'd get an error message).
As far as I know those tools were either immature, nonexistent or proprietary/expensive.
- pydry 5y agoI remember back when XHTML was in vogue (a long time ago now) that there was a blog on the web that advocated for it and somebody posted a comment with an errant character or an unclosed tag or something and overly strict parsing broke the blog on all browsers. I thought that signaled the death knell of XHTML.
- try_again 5y agoThat's really just a failure of input sanitation or not properly escaping special characters or putting the comment in CDATA when constructing the XHTML. Basically that blog allowed an injection attack. Not XHTML's fault, the same software would have allowed any comment to do god knows what in HTML.