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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

I was a big fan of XHTML and all related XML Components, but then politics won.

To this day I'm absolutely flabbergasted that XHTML didn't win out. Well-formed XML documents, rather than a best-guess soup of broken HTML, was perfect. Absolutely perfect. I sat on the edge of my seat for 2-3 years waiting for the XHTML MIME type, with clients performing strict parsing, to become the new norm. It never happened. It's extremely sad if you think about it - we couldn't handle a world where developers had to conform to a very simple level of strictness. Imagine any backend language (C, Java, PHP, etc.) allowing you to get away with vomiting up garbage code with syntax errors, and having the compiler or interpreter best-guessing your program's logic. It's unfathomable! And yet, that is exactly what we have with HTML(5). Mind-boggling, to say the least.

Related aside: to this day, we still cannot write <script src="/main.js"/>. We must use <script src="/main.js"></script>. All because of a multi-decade old description of a CDATA element. Sigh.

The Web 2.0 movement, ditching XHTML and pushing HTML 5 instead was exactly when I went back to focusing in native applications, only doing Web when required to do so.

Web Components look to at least we can get some of those ideas back, instead of writing workarounds with HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

If you call web browser vendors mutinying against the W3C who was pushing XHTML 2 down their throats "politics", which lead to Apple, Mozilla and Opera creating the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) and to HTML5--then I'm okay with the politics.

Yeah, I could close my tags and validate my code with the best of them back when XHTML was a thing--but that's no way to live. I'm glad WHATWG stepped in and literally saved the web from itself. OMG! XHTML 2 would have sucked so much!

> XHTML 2 would have sucked so much!

why/how? because you'd have to close your tags and validate your code?

The way I remember it, there was a guy called Hixie something that was in charge of standards implementation at Mozilla and made a terrific job at that. But then he got hired by Opera and saw that there was no point in competing with Gecko and so he started a FUD campaign called "XHTML considered harmful" to lower market standards. He bluffed you into believing that namespaces are far too complicated for the human mind to comprehend, when in reality XHTML hadn't caught on because the CMS systems were not up to date. He did a terrific job at that, so he got hired by Google to publish a competing specification that was actually based on the way that Internet Explorer 6 parses HTML4. He did at terrific job at that, so we are finally back where we started, with a standard that lives forever while IE6 is long gone, and Goggle can scavenge the specifications from this forgotten future for ideas they can present as original. Even Mozilla played along with the HTML5 scheme, it was like watching a nuclear superpower go down in a fist fight. How can you not call that politics?

I know this is not a popular position here, but I like writing HTML directly (say, without markdown) and appreciate the optional tags and escapes. I can see a big opportunity may have been lost technically...

Yeah but having to switch to createElement, appendChild, insertBefore, createTextNode just because innerHTML was not allowed was a pain in the butt.

at this point i'm considering creating a backend framework that sends a grid of images and uses imagemaps for clicks.

with fast internet raster images shouldn't be a big issue.

Just use SVG/CSS with JavaScript events, that is the approach for the new FitBit SDK.

Adobe ImageReady... now that is giving me some flashbacks. Pun sort of intended.

we could send 60fps image diffs now, we have the bandwidth.

and all the browser does is send the window size and cursor position.

We really don't.

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