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Comment by wrnr | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I'm glad it failed, not in a misanthropic sense, but I think that the idea of xhtml was too ridged and therefore it failed. Other semantic projects have the same issue, not just RDF, but also Lojban, and even formal math. There needs to be some basic structure but outside of that the freedom for interpret and give meaning.

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I think XHTML failed due to a lack of tooling. It was an attempt to force HTML into a formal "compiled" form which machines could understand. Thus what was needed to authors was to use tools to write "source code" (like Markdown) and then "compilers" to transform that into XHTML. Then you needed to be able to verify that it was correct (otherwise you'd get an error message).

As far as I know those tools were either immature, nonexistent or proprietary/expensive.

I remember back when XHTML was in vogue (a long time ago now) that there was a blog on the web that advocated for it and somebody posted a comment with an errant character or an unclosed tag or something and overly strict parsing broke the blog on all browsers.

I thought that signaled the death knell of XHTML.

That's really just a failure of input sanitation or not properly escaping special characters or putting the comment in CDATA when constructing the XHTML. Basically that blog allowed an injection attack. Not XHTML's fault, the same software would have allowed any comment to do god knows what in HTML.

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