Comment by echelon
Google didn't want XML to win.
XHTML would have made the Semantic Web (capital letters) possible. Someone else could have done search better. We might have had a proper P2P web.
They wanted sloppy, because only Google scale could deal with that.
Hopefully the AI era might erode that.
The Semantic Web was never going to win. It does not make sense on a fundamental level.
XHTML's failure had nothing to do with it, and is basically unrelated. Even if xhtml won i fail to see how that would have helped semantic web in any way shape or form.