I use HTML 4.01 Strictly for my personal projects. I'm not worried about sending as application/xhtml+xml , it has full backward compatibility and gives me the technical limitations that I want. I still look like a standard developer, so my code is still clean, although the ML used does not require me (which is a lot).
For me, XHTML seems to have failed a bit. The next most widely used standard in a few years is likely to be HTML5, as the whole XHTML2 project seems to be lagging behind.
I am not saying that it’s bad to use it now. It's just so incredibly rare that you have the advantage of using XHTML instead of HTML. How many XHTML-based web pages do this 100% right now? They mostly fail on the mime type. text/html allowed due to browser compatibility, but still wrong if you look at the whole reason for XHTML. And how much does XHTML functionality really NEED?
I think there are some, but the vast majority of XHTML-based web pages can just change their doctype to HTML 4.01 and work just as well.
So, until I can use XHTML (2?) The way it is supposed (mainly for the MIME type) in all browsers, I just see no reason to use it in HTML 4.01 if my application does not need XML integration. Even then, I would probably think that I’m just making all these changes on the server side and moving from HTML to the template.
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