Comment by the_mitsuhiko
Comment by the_mitsuhiko 10 hours ago
> I don't understand this sentiment. Never have.
It was pretty evident when it happened, particularly because XHTML in some browsers was parsed with a sloppy HTML parser, and in some with an XML parser which was strict. Guess what happened. Tons of invalid XHTML was out there and it made it impossible to parse as XML.
And some of the sloppy parsers rejected valid XML that the strict parsers accepted.
Combined with Firefox and MSIE having different combinations of HTTP headers and doctype declarations to specify XHTML mode, it was way too hard to emit one single doc that was viewable on all common browsers. For a while my life involved regularly chasing down random issues that suddenly made our customers' browsers show an error page instead of the content, even when it was actually valid and passed all validators.
I don't miss this.