[TFNA]

XHTML failed in an era when writers (even normies) were writing some HTML of their own and they could't be trusted to close their tags properly. XHTML also assumed writers would be personally invested in semantic markup like distinguishing e.g. the italics of book titles from the italics of emphasis.

Today, when writers are using visual editors (or Markdown), few are writing their own HTML any more. A web standard requiring compliance would work differently today.

[PaulHoule]

Markdown sux and so do visual editors. I think visual editors were just invented to make it so cut-and-paste never quite works right. There's been some conceptual problem with the whole idea ever since MS Word and the industry has never dealt with it.

[hdjrudni]

I think it could conceivably work. I vaguely remember WinForms being decent. You have to restrict what the user can do a bit. Have things snap into allowed positions.

[CM30]

The issue is that even if you're not writing your own code, you're reliant on your CMS or framework, its plugins and imports, any advertising networks you use, etc not to break your site. There are already issues where those things cause server errors or end up being incompatible with other additions when upgraded, but giving them another way to break your entire site just makes such things even more of a hassle.

[intrasight]

> XHTML failed in an era when writers (even normies) were writing some HTML of their own

I'd say it was a minority of writers that were handcrafting XHTML. And it was the case that everyone or their handcrafting or using tools could validate their compliance using a browser which made it very easy to adjust your tools or your handcrafted code. We are now in a situation where there is no schema for HTML.

I, for one, am very much in favor of forking the web with a document format with a schema. It really seems like a small and simple change to me.

[TFNA]

Note that when I say "writing their own HTML", I don't mean handcrafting a whole webpage. I mean that people were writing i or b tags in their Wordpress editors or in online comment boxes, because back then such text fields did not have visual editors and would accept raw tags. Under XHTML, if the writer did not close tags properly, such input would have broken the whole page, so obviously back then such a standard was DOA.

[singpolyma3]

Those cases were easy to fix by using eg htmltidy on the UGC.

Honestly I don't think it was killed by one thing, or by anything. Just no platform really cared and it wasn't a win for anyone and occasionally a loss.