Why do so many books and sites recommend XHTML over HTML?
When the XHTML 1.0 specification was released, many designers and developers were quite excited about it. It was XML, which was all the rage back then, yet could be used as if it were HTML, and it ‘worked in all browsers’. People saw countless possibilities with the extensibility mechanism, and when W3C stated that there would be no more versions of HTML, XHTML was seen as the future-proof alternative. Eventually some less palatable aspects of using XHTML were uncovered and the extensibility myth was debunked, but this didn’t receive quite the same amount of publicity. Many authors thus still advocate XHTML over HTML out of ignorance or because of personal preference.
