3 ms·

XHTML was not a previous version of HTML; it was a failed successor. HTML was originally conceived as a subset of SGML, but browsers tried to be as forgiving a

by jefftk 1y ago

XHTML was not a previous version of HTML; it was a failed successor. HTML was originally conceived as a subset of SGML, but browsers tried to be as forgiving as possible of malformed markup and HTML-in-practice drove standards folks nuts. XHTML was intended to fix this by making a pure-XML representation of HTML, which would be unambiguous and fast to parse, but its very strict error handling made it extremely difficult to adopt. It turns out people would generally rather have a slightly wrong page than one that just said "XML Parsing Error". WHATWG broke with W3C in 2005 to standardize HTML-in-practice into HTML5, giving up on XML compatibility and strict parsing.

robin_reala 1y ago
It’s not failed: it’s the only language used in the ePub standard. Though this might change with ePub 3.3 which is considering adding HTML support.
- jefftk 1y ago
  Its design goal was to supplant HTML as the language of the web, and regularize communication between browsers and servers. At this it has failed.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > It’s not failed: it’s the only language used in the ePub standard. "XHTML" can refer to both a failed series of standards intended to replace HTML (XHTML 1.0, XHMTL 1.1, and XHMTL 2.0) and the XML syntax of HTML that is part of the HTML living standard, which itself resulted from the failure of the XHMTL series of standards. EPUB 3's "XHTML" is the latter, not the former.
asadotzler 1y ago
I'm 90% certain that the origin of WHATWG was in late 2003 or early 2004 when Dave Hyatt (Ex-Mozilla, then with Apple) Ian Hickson (ex-Opera, ex-Mozilla, then at Google) Start Parmenter (ex-Mozilla, then at OSAF or Oracle, I think,) Brendan Eich (still with Mozilla,) and a couple other folks were at Mozilla's brand new closet of an office, talking about XHTML's shortcomings, advanced we'd made with XUL, and how the web could best move forward given the XHTML failure and challenges from new platforms. I was a fly on the wall for that conversation and then a fly in IRC for more conversations, but it has been ages and my memory's not what it was then, (and I'm too lazy to dig through 30 years of archived emails to verify) so take it with a grain of salt.

by jefftk 1y ago

robin_reala 1y ago

It’s not failed: it’s the only language used in the ePub standard. Though this might change with ePub 3.3 which is considering adding HTML support.

jefftk 1y ago
Its design goal was to supplant HTML as the language of the web, and regularize communication between browsers and servers. At this it has failed.
dragonwriter 1y ago
> It’s not failed: it’s the only language used in the ePub standard. "XHTML" can refer to both a failed series of standards intended to replace HTML (XHTML 1.0, XHMTL 1.1, and XHMTL 2.0) and the XML syntax of HTML that is part of the HTML living standard, which itself resulted from the failure of the XHMTL series of standards. EPUB 3's "XHTML" is the latter, not the former.

asadotzler 1y ago

I'm 90% certain that the origin of WHATWG was in late 2003 or early 2004 when Dave Hyatt (Ex-Mozilla, then with Apple) Ian Hickson (ex-Opera, ex-Mozilla, then at Google) Start Parmenter (ex-Mozilla, then at OSAF or Oracle, I think,) Brendan Eich (still with Mozilla,) and a couple other folks were at Mozilla's brand new closet of an office, talking about XHTML's shortcomings, advanced we'd made with XUL, and how the web could best move forward given the XHTML failure and challenges from new platforms. I was a fly on the wall for that conversation and then a fly in IRC for more conversations, but it has been ages and my memory's not what it was then, (and I'm too lazy to dig through 30 years of archived emails to verify) so take it with a grain of salt.