To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Without XML analness well get the nonstandard compliant mess of html 4. I like the XHTML approach "if it's not correct you don't have to render it". This will force tool vendors to make sure their editors generate proper tags and will make parsing html for its data much easier.
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/
It depends on your design goals and the audience in which you want to interact with:
1.4.1. HTML vs XHTML
This section is non-normative.
This specification defines an abstract language for describing documents and applications, and some APIs for interacting with in-memory representations of resources that use this language.
The in-memory representation is known as "DOM5 HTML", or "the DOM" for short.
There are various concrete syntaxes that can be used to transmit resources that use this abstract language, two of which are defined in this specification.
The first such concrete syntax is "HTML5". This is the format recommended for most authors. It is compatible with all legacy Web browsers. If a document is transmitted with the MIME type text/html, then it will be processed as an "HTML5" document by Web browsers.
The second concrete syntax uses XML, and is known as "XHTML5". When a document is transmitted with an XML MIME type, such as application/xhtml+xml, then it is processed by an XML processor by Web browsers, and treated as an "XHTML5" document. Generally speaking, authors are discouraged from trying to use XML on the Web, because XML has much stricter syntax rules than the "HTML5" variant described above, and is relatively newer and therefore less mature.
The "DOM5 HTML", "HTML5", and "XHTML5" representations cannot all represent the same content. For example, namespaces cannot be represented using "HTML5", but they are supported in "DOM5 HTML" and "XHTML5". Similarly, documents that use the noscript feature can be represented using "HTML5", but cannot be represented with "XHTML5" and "DOM5 HTML". Comments that contain the string "-->" can be represented in "DOM5 HTML" but not in "HTML5" and "XHTML5". And so forth.




Member since:
2005-11-21
http://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#evolution-not-revoluti...
2.5. Evolution Not Revolution
Revolutions sometimes change the world to the better. Most often, however, it is better to evolve an existing design rather than throwing it away. This way, authors don't have to learn new models and content will live longer. Specifically, this means that one should prefer to design features so that old content can take advantage of new features without having to make unrelated changes. And implementations should be able to add new features to existing code, rather than having to develop whole separate modes.
Switching to XML syntax requires a global change, so continue supporting classic HTML syntax as well.
Anyone who uses XML will most certainly use XML complaint syntax that is first citizen for HTML 5.