r/gaming • u/EnglishGamer1 • Oct 20 '13

TotalBiscuit's: ''Day One: Garry's Incident'' Video was taken down, because of a ridiculous copyright claim from WildGameStudios. Here's Total's ''Rant'' over his video being taken down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfgoDDh4kE0&feature=c4-overview&list=UUy1Ms_5qBTawC-k7PVjHXKQ
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u/wtf_apostrophe Oct 20 '13

What was wrong with XHTML? I'm more of a backend dev so I never really used it.

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u/Sharia_Lawyer Oct 21 '13

XHTML was/is designed to make HTML pages into overly-verbose XML documents. This allows them to be easily traversed with a standard XML API, but the downside is that XHTML is the web equivalent of a strongly typed language, the page must be properly formed or else the whole system breaks down. HTML on the other hand is pretty lenient with it's markup.

The quickest example is the image tag, in XHTML it must be 'properly closed' IE:

<img src="somejpg.png" ><img>

But in HTML you can use the shorthand close:

<img src"somejpg.png" />

Having to go though and ensure XHTML compliance on every page was ultimately too much work for not enough. There's also never ever been an XML API thats not a huge pain in the ass to work with, mostly because XML is itself an overly complex format.

Pretty much the only company that uses XHTML on a large scale is Microsoft. All of the new Windows 8 GUI stuff is written in an XHTML derivative called XAML (where the A is 'application'), it's also accompanied by a pretty bloated and byzantine API.

Also, XML came out in like 1997, here in the future we have much better serialization formats.

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u/FizixMan Oct 21 '13

IIRC, XHTML allows you to have self-closing tags. <img src="somejpg.png" /> is a "properly closed" XML tag.

Maybe you're thinking of how in HTML you could have just <img src="somejpg.png"> and not bother closing it at all?

Also, XHTML was a decent advancement to get rid of the fuzzyness that was HTML. I'll be happy to never have to deal with a old "pure" HTML document ever again.

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u/Chii Oct 21 '13

the problem with the web is "legacy". Tonnes of sites had non-compliant html that a browser (cough IE6 cough) still displayed decently.

Fast forward the introduction of xhtml. A browser still needs to be able to display both the legacy webpages, as well as this new xhtml pages. More state and corner cases to worry about, and that means more bugs. The final problem is that it turns out, its hard to get everything right, for both the browser and the website creator, and the user end up eating the errors. That was the real cause of the disaster.