Re: XHTML is no longer being maintained

Switching away from XHTML to HTML has been a topic for years in the various
EPUB related groups. From a reading system perspective, most RSes load
their content into webviews or the browser as HTML anyway, since XHTML has
been finicky since ... well, since forever. But there are parts of the
pipeline in almost all RSes that assume they are getting well-formed XML,
so we have never gone the route of allowing it as a core media type. Every
once in a while there is a bit of a push when something breaks (e.g.
scripting has some XHTML issues), but the cure has always been worse than
the disease. Maybe the time has come (or is coming) to bring it up again.

On Fri, Aug 2, 2024 at 12:14 PM Alyssa Riceman <
alyssaricemanepub0@mailbox.org> wrote:

> Hi!
>
> According to modern editions of the HTML Living Standard (
> https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/xhtml.html):
>
> > the XML syntax is essentially unmaintained — in that, it’s not expected
> that any further features will ever be added to the XML syntax (even when
> such features have been added to the HTML syntax).
>
> (Where 'the XML syntax' is XHTML.)
>
> This seems worrying! One of the great advances of modern EPUB over the
> format's earlier versions was unpinning the versions of its core media
> types, allowing use of—among other things—arbitrarily-modern HTML in our
> XHTML content documents (within the limits of what readers will
> realistically be able to handle); but now here we are getting stuck on the
> path to outdatedness anyway, for our XHTML content documents, on the basis
> that they no longer will be modern HTML.
>
> (Indeed, I've already personally run afoul of a case where this is
> relevant: XHTML, unlike modern HTML, lacks support for Declarative Shadow
> DOM, which I'd been hoping I might be able to make use of in a
> currently-ongoing EPUB-related project of mine.)
>
> I don't know what, if anything, it would make sense to do about this. The
> ideal, of course, would be to magically produce some new maintainers for
> HTML's XML syntax so it can be returned to consistent up-to-date-ness with
> non-X HTML; but that seems likely to be difficult, potentially to the point
> of logistical infeasibility, and no other possible solutions have yet
> occurred to me which seem any more feasible than that one.
> (Likely-less-feasibly, of course, there's some temptation towards allowing
> use of non-XML-syntax HTML within EPUB; but that seems, from my
> admittedly-limited knowledge, likely to be an impractical path to go down
> which would inflict large amounts of difficulty on developers of reader
> software.)
>
> Still, even absent immediate knowledge of a solution, it seems like a
> concern worth raising to the group's attention, and (as far as I can tell
> from skimming the group archives) not one which has already been raised by
> anyone else. So here it is. Does this appear to be a real problem to others
> here as it does to me? And, if so, are there any potential solutions I've
> missed which are apparent to others here and worth pursuing in more depth?
>
> Thanks,
> Alyssa Riceman
>
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