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by com2kid 309 days ago
> I recall being met with a big fat "XML parse error" page on occasion. If XHTML really took off (as in a significant majority of web pages were XHTML), those XML parse error pages would become way more common

Except JSX is being used now all over the place and JSX is basically the return of XHTML! JSX is an XML schema with inline JavaScript.

The difference now days is all in the tooling. It is either precompiled (so the devs see the error) or generated on the backend by a proper library and not someone YOLOing PHP to super glue strings together, as per how dynamic pages were generated in the glory days of XHTML.

We basically got full circle back to XHTML, but with a lot more complications and a worse user experience!
2 comments
MarkSweep 309 days ago
Speaking of PHP, XHP predates JSX I believe:

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

Same idea: an XML-like syntax for creating object trees typically used to model HTML.

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mort96 309 days ago
Nobody is generating JSX dynamically.
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com2kid 309 days ago
Not directly as strings of course, but a for loop that outputs a bunch of JSX components based on the array return values from a DB fetch is dynamically generated JSX.
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mort96 309 days ago
No, it's not. The JSX, as in the text in the source file, is static. You can't accidentally forget to escape a string from the database and therefore end up with invalid JSX syntax, like you can when dynamically generating HTML. You're dynamically generating shadow DOM nodes, but the JSX is static.
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com2kid 308 days ago
You are saying the exact same thing I am, just with different words.

JSX makes it impossible to crap out invalid HTML because it is a library + toolchain (+ entire ecosystem) that keeps it from happening. JSX is always checked for validity before it gets close to the user, so the most irritating failure case of XHTML just doesn't happen.

XHTML never had they benefit. My point is that if libraries like React or Vue had been popular at the time of XHTML, then XHTML's strictness wouldn't have been an issue because JSX always generated valid outputs (well ignoring compiler bugs which I far too damn many of early on in React's life)

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