Great thought. I really don’t see why most people have any reason to use XHTML….and 99% of those who use it, use aren’t using it right and therefore blow away their own arguments about why they use it.

I think the reason some people like XHTML over HTML is that they believe it is easier to “parse” (XML in general, including) XHTML, as compared to HTML.

That by having everyone use XHTML, they can use a generic XML parser to process handle XHTML.

They don’t seem to have this processing and handling power for HTML on the server-side. (Client side you have this power, of course. But NOT server-side.)

Well,… that’s the belief anyways.

And I guess there is some truth to it.

For example, PHP developers tend to like to use SimpleXML. But SimpleXML required well formated XML. (And HTML generally is not XML.)

There are other PHP tools for handling HTML… like DOM… but I’m not sure if that’s automatically compiled into most distributions of PHP. (And custom compiling PHP is beyond most developers’ tendencies.)

— Charles

Personally, I use XHTML because I find the syntax to be fundamentally more logical. I like the requirement to complete every element and the case sensitivity…for that reason, I simply find it easier to use than HTML.

However, as you noticed, there’s absolutely NOTHING wrong with using HTML; nor is there anything superior about using XHTML. I don’t really buy the arguments that delivering XHTML as text/html is such a horrible thing, myself — but that may be because I have reasons for using XHTML which really have nothing to do with the parsability of XML.