You didn't love the strict and unhelpful generic XML exception you got when you accidentally forgot to close a tag?

Don't blame bad tools on the language.

I thought the whole point of XML tags coming in named pairs was so you could be helpfully told which tag wasn't closed?

XHTML was a move by Big CMS to make edit-and-FTP error prone. Before that you rarely had to care whether the tag was closed.

Is this a joke? I genuinely can't tell.

Tell me you weren't there without telling me you weren't there. Big CMS hated it.

I've always been completely baffled by the rejection of xhtml. It gave a way to extend html with new elements and a simple, powerful client side templating language with xslt. The "reason" for which I remember it being rejected was that allegedly web devs couldn't wrap their heads around closing tags and explicit attribute values, which seems crazy to me. Then a few years later typescript took off (which is way more complicated) and react gave a pretend way to write xml except now you need a compiler/build pipeline, and everyone loved it.

xhtml still works in modern browsers btw. It's still probably the easiest way to do page templates. XSLT shows its age without the ability to modify the page after load (unless you run it via javascript), but we could've just added that and it'd be almost perfect.