Producing HTML using string templates has always been the wrong solution

The author is right to criticize non-HTML-aware template "engines" as giant injection vectors, but like most people, fails in his blind XML enthusiasm to see that HTML's origin SGML has all the means for type-safe HTML templating.

Also, the argument against XHTML has never been that authors couldn't be bothered to write correct markup. Up until version 4, HTML was specified as an SGML vocabulary, which, considering XML is a subset of SGML, is by definition just as formal as XML, having additional concepts such as markup minimization however that XML heads can't be bothered to learn. No, the argument is and was 1. the installed base of billions of pages out there and 2. that W3C wanted to introduce completely unproven moonshots to browsers (such as XForms) rather than merely a simplified canonical syntax with XHTML2.