== Why XHTML was doomed from the beginning

[[Yesterday DevilsAgainstStandards]] I said that XHTML was an obviously
flawed standard right from the start. I should actually clarify that,
and then explain it. First, XHTML is probably not flawed from a strictly
technical perspective (I don't have the expertise to be sure). Instead,
it has always been flawed on the larger, social level of how nominal
standards turn into real standards that people actually use.

(Ie, XHTML doesn't solve [[the real problem ../tech/SocialProblemsMatter]].)

The short version is that XHTML was doomed from the start because it
ignored the reality of how actual people create actual web pages on the
Internet. We can see this because of three mistakes it made:  XHTML
requires draconian error handling (in a decision inherited from XML),
but you have to serve XHTML with a specific MIME type in order to
trigger this ([[cf XHTMLValidation]]), and XHTML is renderable as HTML
(and it looks basically right).  The first decision is the fatal blow;
the other two just add a lot of salt to the self-inflicted wound.

The core issue is that actual people create web pages not by reading
standards but instead by a process that most closely resembles folklore.
They vaguely know how things are supposed to work, they may peek with
web searches or with 'view source', and they pretty much stop when the
result renders the way they want or expect. People who even know what a
validator is are a very small portion of the web authoring world, and
always have been.

Draconian error handling is always going to be a massive failure in this
environment, because people following this approach will always make
lots of 'errors'. This leads to a terrible authoring experience where
the typical person spends much of their time trying to get their browser
to stop showing them a big yellow 'invalid XML' box, instead of doing
interesting things like improving their content or how things look.
People aren't exactly enthused about jumping through hoops to appease
the computer instead of doing productive things.

(The other two decisions add salt because they cause lots of people to
create invalid XHTML when they think they are actually authoring valid
XHTML. This is an even worse failure mode than before in the long term.)

Any format with draconian error handling pretty much can't be written
by hand, since people make mistakes; it has to be written by program,
and ideally only a few programs that are carefully developed. Web
page authoring has never worked this way, so XHTML's insistence on
draconian error handling required a fantasy world where web authors
would drastically change how they created web pages when they moved from
HTML to XHTML.

(This omits all of the other pragmatic problems with draconian error
handling, like programs with bugs.)