XHTML 2 Cancelled

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The charter for the XHTML2 Working Group — set to expire on December 31st, 2009 and will not be renewed. Hurray!

I was never much of a fan of XHTML. HTML was hugely successfully because it was rather loose in what it accepts. Very approachable and modestly forgiving. XHTML was an XML purists delight, but unlike HTML where a missing tag would botch the page but often still mostly legible, any XHTML document that's not well-formed simply renders nothing. Zip. Nada. Bupkus.

Or as one comment summarized, HTML lets any dyslexic illiterate create web pages the browser has to try to understand, whereas XHTML requires the user to work the way the tool wants. Sorry Charlie. 'Taint Skynet. Machines are supposed to be here to make peoples lives easier, not the other way around.

Good riddance XHTML. Welcome HTML5 :-)