Re:How Browsers Work: Behind the Scenes of Modern Web Browsers
by flomo on Tuesday February 14, 2012 @02:26PM
(#3591375)
> The problem that killed XHTML was the draconian error handling in most browser.
I'd argue just the opposite. Browsers treated XHTML doctypes as "tag-soup" HTML4. Firefox would only validate the document if you used the xhtml mime type, in which case you lost progressive rendering and your site would seem slow to the user.
The key point here is that XML wasn't doing any favors to the browser vendors - their rendering model just didn't work that way internally.
Net result is a gazillion 'XHTML' documents which aren't actually XML. Now you can't start to throw up end-user warnings or half the web would appear to be broken. So, admit it was a dubious idea to begin with and start over.
I'd argue just the opposite. Browsers treated XHTML doctypes as "tag-soup" HTML4. Firefox would only validate the document if you used the xhtml mime type, in which case you lost progressive rendering and your site would seem slow to the user.
The key point here is that XML wasn't doing any favors to the browser vendors - their rendering model just didn't work that way internally.
Net result is a gazillion 'XHTML' documents which aren't actually XML. Now you can't start to throw up end-user warnings or half the web would appear to be broken. So, admit it was a dubious idea to begin with and start over.