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

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Henri Sivonen wrote:

>> 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.
>
> "In theory?" Do you put the chances of Firefox 4 actually getting out
> of beta soonish in the "in theory" category?
>
> Are the expectations of IE9 and Safari shipping with SVG-in-text/html
> support also in the "in theory" department in your opinion?

If you say so. Haven't you ever encountered theories that have been 
supported by factual evidence, or even turned out to practical certainty?

Whether, how, and when some new browser versions are shipped with support to 
something is more or less speculative. It is even more speculative how fast 
the use share of such and later versions will get so large that we can 
forget current browser versions. Such things tend to take a couple of years 
at least, so the phrase "in theory" was practically justified, I would say.

>> But with XHTML, you can expect to be
>> able to inject XML tags from any namespace known to a browser
>
> What namespaces are known to a browser but aren't the namespaces that
> the HTML parsing algorithm can emit?

It is possible that browsers will add HTML-mode support to new XML tag sets 
at the same time as they get supported in XHTML mode. But as I have been 
told that there are human beings that develop browser software, and big 
companies, they might favor XHTML for some reasons.

>> Another potential benefit is that with XHTML, the documents are ready
>> to be processed by XML tools.
>
> The benefit is lessened by the availability of HTML parsers that can
> convert to XHTML or that can expose an API to the application that
> makes the application think it's dealing with an XML parser.

Existing software does not suddenly change just because there are software 
components that might have been used to create it.

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