Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "XHTML" in English language version.
Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) is an extension of HTML that is based on XML and is designed to work with XML-based applications.
... Since the design goals of XML itself partially mirrored those of the original HTML, it was logical for work to begin on formulating an XML–based markup language...
There are not nearly as many disadvantages (if any) to sending XHTML as text/HTML as [Ian Hickson] claims and the advantages I mentioned above make it well worth using in my humble opinion. There are some subtle footnotes and parentheticals [in Hickson's article] indicating that the harmfulness only applies to authors that don't know the pitfalls of this practice, but much like the "Do not eat" label on the little packets of silica gel, Ian's advisory seems to be common sense and not worth mentioning to any author who actually knows what XHTML is and how to write it.
Some people say XHTML on the Web has failed, but I say it is our biggest success in the fight for Web Standards. ... XHTML is a good thing for the web, though, and it's a shame that people are trying to make a case against it. To prove this, I'll flesh out the myth for you and then show you why XHTML is the best thing since sliced bread when it comes to our fight for Web Standards. ... So to conclude, sending XHTML as text/html causes no damage or harm anywhere today, as long as your XHTML does validate. And, if you want Web Standards to become more and more widespread, stick to using XHTML and validate your pages.
... However, since ISO 8879 does not afford applications the leeway to prohibit internal subsets, it follows that the letter of the HTML [4] spec automatically disentitles it to be a conforming SGML application...
Some things are clearer with the hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn't work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely because the browsers didn't complain. Some large communities did shift and are enjoying the fruits of well-formed systems, but not all. It is important to maintain HTML incrementally, as well as continue a transition to [a] well-formed world, and develop more power in that world.
"The plan is to charter a completely new HTML group. Unlike the previous one, this one will be chartered to do incremental improvements to HTML, as also in parallel XHTML. It will have a different chair and staff contact. It will work on HTML and xHTML together. We have strong support for this group, from many people we have talked to, including browser makers.
... It has been a long-standing goal of the W3C to make it possible for different types of XML-based content to be mixed together in the same XML file. For example, SVG and MathML might be incorporated directly into an XHTML-based scientific document...
I've also been reading comments for some time in the IEBlog asking for support for the "application/xml+xhtml" MIME type in IE. I should say that IE7 will not add support for this MIME type – we will, of course, continue to read XHTML when served as "text/html", presuming it follows the HTML compatibility recommendations.
...If we tried to support real XHTML in IE 7 we would have ended up using our existing HTML parser (which is focused on compatibility) and hacking in XML constructs. It is highly unlikely we could support XHTML well in this way; in particular, we would certainly not detect a few error cases here or there, and we would silently support invalid cases. This would, of course, cause compatibility problems based on parser error handling in the future, which XML is explicitly trying to avoid; we don't want to cause another mess like the one with current HTML error handling (rooted in compatibility with earlier browsers – you can blame me for that personally somewhat, but not IE). I would much rather take the time to implement XHTML properly after IE 7, and have it be truly interoperable...
...At this time, we're looking for developer feedback on our implementation of HTML5's parsing rules, Selection APIs, XHTML support, and inline SVG. Within CSS3, we're looking for developer feedback on IE9's support for Selectors, Namespaces, Colors, Values, Backgrounds and Borders, and Fonts....
style attribute and the cite element. Developer Daniel Glazman offers similar criticism, but also shows support for some backward-incompatible changes such as the decision to remove the ins and del elements.... with an XML-based HTML other XML languages could include bits of XHTML, and XHTML documents could include bits of other markup languages. We could also take advantage of the redesign to clean up some of the more untidy parts of HTML and add some new needed functionality, like better forms...
... XHTML2... defines a new HTML vocabulary with better features for hyperlinks, multimedia content, annotating document edits, rich metadata, declarative interactive forms, and describing the semantics of human literary works such as poems and scientific papers... However, it lacks elements to express the semantics of many of the non-document types of content often seen on the Web. For instance, forum sites, auction sites, search engines, online shops, and the like, do not fit the document metaphor well and are not covered by XHTML2... This specification aims to extend HTML so that it is also suitable in these contexts...
style attribute and the cite element. Developer Daniel Glazman offers similar criticism, but also shows support for some backward-incompatible changes such as the decision to remove the ins and del elements.... However, since ISO 8879 does not afford applications the leeway to prohibit internal subsets, it follows that the letter of the HTML [4] spec automatically disentitles it to be a conforming SGML application...
... Since the design goals of XML itself partially mirrored those of the original HTML, it was logical for work to begin on formulating an XML–based markup language...
... It has been a long-standing goal of the W3C to make it possible for different types of XML-based content to be mixed together in the same XML file. For example, SVG and MathML might be incorporated directly into an XHTML-based scientific document...
Some things are clearer with the hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn't work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely because the browsers didn't complain. Some large communities did shift and are enjoying the fruits of well-formed systems, but not all. It is important to maintain HTML incrementally, as well as continue a transition to [a] well-formed world, and develop more power in that world.
"The plan is to charter a completely new HTML group. Unlike the previous one, this one will be chartered to do incremental improvements to HTML, as also in parallel XHTML. It will have a different chair and staff contact. It will work on HTML and xHTML together. We have strong support for this group, from many people we have talked to, including browser makers.
... The problem: You want to take advantage of the power and simplicity that XML tools can offer, but you face a site full of aging HTML documents. The solution: Convert your documents to XHTML and put Perl and XML::XPath to work...... A useful feature of XHTML is that it can be manipulated as XML. Extensible Stylesheet Language Templates can be used to transform XHTML into WML or any other proprietary mobile formats...