IMHO XHTML is pretty painful. Even if you say: okay, there is a server-side auto-generated markup tree and we can formally verify what happens. There is now a solution to that and it's called (server-side) React which is basically a (useful) alternative to XSLT. Except that it outputs HTML5.
Even if you argue that the specs are huge. Just compare book sizes about XML, XSLT vs HTML5 and CSS, JS, React. When I actually tried to do some useful work with XSLT (which needs to be mentioned here IMHO), I realized that the - less painful - 2.0 version is hardly implemented by anyone.
Regarding the parsing: X(HT)ML lexing is ridiculously easy, for HTML5 it's slightly more difficult but not tough at all. You just need to keep a list of closing vs self-closing tags. Not talking about building in fault-tolerance, that would be tough, yes, even tougher for XML!
> XHTML was a worthy goal – with it, we wouldn’t have a need to run headless
> Chrome for tests. We could parse the web, and actually use the data.
> OpenGraph tags would never have been necessary. We wouldn’t need to throw
> DNNs at rendered output of a browser just to parse data.
Yes and no. If you use CSS for styling, the answer is no. If you require JS to show the initial show/page, the answer is no as well. But yeah, if you use the whole XML machinery with XSLT and possibly even XPATH, then you would be kind of right. I mean, as long as we properly handle the schemas and dtd's - which almost no parser does AFAIK. So it's true, one can do pretty bad-ass stuff with all the X*. But tooling and library support is not good and has never been. XSLT 1.x is insanely difficult to use and XSLT 2.x hard to fully implement I guess.
Even if you argue that the specs are huge. Just compare book sizes about XML, XSLT vs HTML5 and CSS, JS, React. When I actually tried to do some useful work with XSLT (which needs to be mentioned here IMHO), I realized that the - less painful - 2.0 version is hardly implemented by anyone.
Regarding the parsing: X(HT)ML lexing is ridiculously easy, for HTML5 it's slightly more difficult but not tough at all. You just need to keep a list of closing vs self-closing tags. Not talking about building in fault-tolerance, that would be tough, yes, even tougher for XML!
> XHTML was a worthy goal – with it, we wouldn’t have a need to run headless
> Chrome for tests. We could parse the web, and actually use the data.
> OpenGraph tags would never have been necessary. We wouldn’t need to throw
> DNNs at rendered output of a browser just to parse data.
Yes and no. If you use CSS for styling, the answer is no. If you require JS to show the initial show/page, the answer is no as well. But yeah, if you use the whole XML machinery with XSLT and possibly even XPATH, then you would be kind of right. I mean, as long as we properly handle the schemas and dtd's - which almost no parser does AFAIK. So it's true, one can do pretty bad-ass stuff with all the X*. But tooling and library support is not good and has never been. XSLT 1.x is insanely difficult to use and XSLT 2.x hard to fully implement I guess.