[html5] What are the potential benefits of using XHTML?

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Jacob Kristensen wrote:

> Seeing that HTML adds support for SVG etc. When exactly would there
> be any clear benefits to using XHTML?

On the practical side, e.g. Firefox does not currently do <svg> in HTML 
mode, but it does do <svg:svg> in XHTML mode.

In theory, this is expected to change. But with XHTML, you can expect to be 
able to inject XML tags from any namespace known to a browser - whereas in 
HTML mode, you need to limit yourself to those tag sets that have been 
imported into HTML.

Another potential benefit is that with XHTML, the documents are ready to be 
processed by XML tools. While common search engines can be expected to 
process HTML, too, specialized robots might limit themselves to XML 
compatible markup due to its simplicity (in terms of parsing, and draconian 
error handling might be an asset here).

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/