[drdaeman]

That battle is long lost.

For me the revelatory moment was in mid-00s, when everyone screamed anathema at XHTML, saying it was bad because it required people to write well-formed documents, when everyone just wanted to slap random tags and somehow have that steaming mess to still work.

There must me some sort of law that says in tech the crudest pile of hacks wins over any formally elegant solution every single time those hacks lets one do something that requires extra effort otherwise, even if it works only by wildest chance.

[joshuaissac]

> There must me some sort of law that says in tech the crudest pile of hacks wins over any formally elegant solution

This is called 'Worse is better'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

[TylerE]

The biggest objection I and many others had at the time was that writing xhtml forced one to deal with hell that is xml namespaces, which many tools at the time barely supported