[PLejeck]

First of all, documents are not data. If you think it's data, you're sorely mistaken. HTML was designed as a way of MARKING UP text, not for making a DOM tree.

The DOM is simply a way of representing HTML for scripting access and whatnot.

Second, it is not to be resistant to corruption, it's to be resistant to human error. Also, many formats ARE resistant to that, thanks to various error correction algorithms.

Have you ever heard the story behind kernel panics? Errors should not be shown to end users when they are recoverable. Errors happen every second, if we let them all out, computers would be unusable.

Thirdly, that "XHTML is easy" assumes that everybody has embraced HAML or Jade or other sugary templates. I personally find they all suck horribly, so I use Handlebars (a Mustache variant) and write the HTML myself.

[jmillikin]

  > Thirdly, that "XHTML is easy" assumes that everybody has
  > embraced HAML or Jade or other sugary templates. I
  > personally find they all suck horribly, so I use
  > Handlebars (a Mustache variant) and write the HTML
  > myself.

You don't have to use weird template languages; standard markup is fine, assuming your template library supports it. For example, my site's templates are written in XHTML 1.1, which is automatically converted to HTML4 for older browsers.