

XHTML 2 Working Group Expected to Stop Work End of 2009 - daleharvey
http://www.w3.org/News/2009#item119

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daleharvey
completely ignoring the side issues, I think its a shame that we will
apparently never be able to use the thousands of xml tools on html sites.

 __goes off to write a html parser for my favourite language(its not ruby or
python)

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jmillikin
XHTML 2 is being dropped in favor of XHTML 5, which is being developed in sync
with HTML 5. XHTML itself will remain as (un-)popular as always.

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crs
You know I just don't understand why some people are so against XHTML.

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jmillikin
Anybody can vomit text into a file, rename it ".html", and have it rendered to
something by a web browser. When they try the same thing with XHTML, they
receive an error page. Even otherwise reasonable programmers, who would not
expect invalid code to be parsed by a compiler, blithely contribute to the
spread of invalid HTML. For example, the front page of news.yc fails with 143
errors:

[http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombina...](http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0)

A second factor is that IE does not support XHTML. Any features that rely on
XHTML support (inline SVG, MathML, custom attributes, &c) are unavailable in a
"portable" application. IE 6 is still a very large chunk of the market,
especially among non-technical users, so relying on any features it doesn't
support is iffy from a business perspective.

