- From: Muhammed Anas <muhammedanaspaika@gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2026 07:51:19 +0530
- To: public-html@w3.org
I want to ask this group to revisit XHTML 2.0. The specification was halted in 2009 for good reasons, and I am not asking to relitigate that decision. But the web changed since then, and the strongest objection from 2009 no longer holds in the form it once did. In 2009, strictness had to be enforced at parse time by the browser. A well-formedness error blanked the page. Tolerant parsing was a feature of the open web, not a bug, and that is the price XHTML 2.0 paid. Nobody argues with that today. Today the locus of enforcement has moved. Machines produce and correct markup: generators, linters, fixers, and AI tooling can emit well-formed markup as a default and fix mistakes cheaply when they slip. Browsers can keep their tolerant parser. Strictness becomes a property of the document, not the parser. Documents are well-formed, serialized canonically, and validated against a schema. In 2009 that was the most expensive thing to guarantee. Who benefits? Machine-generated and machine-maintained documents, such as AI-generated pages, code-generated sites, and long-lived documents that need canonical diffs and revalidation. That demand side did not exist in 2009.
Received on Monday, 14 September 2026 11:09:17 UTC