[runroader]

So I guess it really is true that nothing actually gets removed -- except the one that wasn't actually controlled by WhatWG or W3C.

Is there still a real-world use case for XHTML/"XML syntax for HTML", or is this just exhibit A that no standard can actually be removed from browsers?

Re: XSLT, back in the everything-is-XML days I desperately wanted to like XSLT, it seemed so useful (I was that annoying co-worker telling everyone it's supposed to be pronounced "exalt"). But it was such a disaster to actually write or read and no real debugging was possible, I had to use a LOT of conditional bgcolor=red to figure anything out. It didn't take very long to come to the conclusion that XPath was the only useful part.

[JimDabell]

> So I guess it really is true that nothing actually gets removed -- except the one that wasn't actually controlled by WhatWG or W3C.

XSLT is a W3C standard:

https://www.w3.org/TR/xslt/

[mark_and_sweep]

> Is there still a real-world use case for XHTML

If I need the markup of a page to not contain any structural errors, I often use XHTML for testing at least because, though it's a little more verbose, if there's a nesting error, for example, the browser will flat out refuse to render it and show some sort of stacktrace error page instead. So it's quite a good built-in "tool" for checking that your markup is clean.

With HTML, everything goes and the browser will happily render broken markup, which is probably the correct default for the web as a whole. After all, you surely don't want a page like Wikipedia to show an error message to its users because a developer forgot to close a tag somewhere.