4 ms·

Explain to me why XHTML did not stay with us?

tomtomtom777 5y ago
It didn't survive because HTML5 came along with very well defined and strict parsing rules. You don't need closing tags for a specification to be strict. As long as you define the parsing rules rigorously as HTML5 does, there is little benefit in XML compliance and there is in a well defined non-XML standard as it is mostly backwards compatible.
coldtea 5y ago
Because nobody cared much for it, and it didn't give us what we actually wanted, which HTML5 did...
magila 5y ago
XHTML never really had a chance because the dominant browser at the time, Internet Explorer, never supported it. Since people were going to have to deal with all of IE's quirks anyways there was little appetite for putting in the effort to support XHTML too.
jcranmer 5y ago
It depends on what you mean by 'XHTML.' One of the possible definitions is a mode of HTML that was forced to be strictly validating by an XML parser. Adoption of this was hurt by the fact that XHTML-delivered-as-XHTML didn't work correctly in the dominant browser of the time. But HTML5 also delivered a fully-specified parser that explained how to handle tag soup correctly, which meant the problem trying to be solved here (having to parse HTML files into a DOM) was solved in a different way. Another possible definition is the XHTML 2.0 definition, which tried to rip out a lot of HTML features and replace them with more semantic definitions and was largely an effort that was entirely divorced from reality (to the point of driving out the web browser implementors entirely from the working group).
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  HTML5 rules didn't solve the problem of parsing HTML files into a DOM. Instead it mandated the existence of HTML files which, when parsed, converted to HTML, and parsed again, produce a different tree than the first time around. This harmful property can be used to develop XSS exploits like https://research.securitum.com/mutation-xss-via-mathml-mutation-dompurify-2-0-17-bypass/ https://research.securitum.com/mutation-xss-via-mathml-mutat....

It didn't survive because HTML5 came along with very well defined and strict parsing rules. You don't need closing tags for a specification to be strict. As long as you define the parsing rules rigorously as HTML5 does, there is little benefit in XML compliance and there is in a well defined non-XML standard as it is mostly backwards compatible.

coldtea 5y ago

Because nobody cared much for it, and it didn't give us what we actually wanted, which HTML5 did...

magila 5y ago

XHTML never really had a chance because the dominant browser at the time, Internet Explorer, never supported it. Since people were going to have to deal with all of IE's quirks anyways there was little appetite for putting in the effort to support XHTML too.

jcranmer 5y ago

It depends on what you mean by 'XHTML.' One of the possible definitions is a mode of HTML that was forced to be strictly validating by an XML parser. Adoption of this was hurt by the fact that XHTML-delivered-as-XHTML didn't work correctly in the dominant browser of the time. But HTML5 also delivered a fully-specified parser that explained how to handle tag soup correctly, which meant the problem trying to be solved here (having to parse HTML files into a DOM) was solved in a different way. Another possible definition is the XHTML 2.0 definition, which tried to rip out a lot of HTML features and replace them with more semantic definitions and was largely an effort that was entirely divorced from reality (to the point of driving out the web browser implementors entirely from the working group).

nyanpasu64 5y ago
HTML5 rules didn't solve the problem of parsing HTML files into a DOM. Instead it mandated the existence of HTML files which, when parsed, converted to HTML, and parsed again, produce a different tree than the first time around. This harmful property can be used to develop XSS exploits like https://research.securitum.com/mutation-xss-via-mathml-mutation-dompurify-2-0-17-bypass/ https://research.securitum.com/mutation-xss-via-mathml-mutat....