“same shit, different year”
Well, it’s true that there’s no particular advantage to using XHTML (unless you want to imbed some MathML) but it’s hardly causing a problem on the web. What these (rather tiresome) critics are saying seems to be: “The W3C says you ’should’ not serve it with a text/html MIME type”. But it doesn’t. These people evidently haven’t read the sources they wish to cite. The W3C says you should not serve XHTML *1.1* with that MIME type; it has varying requirements for serving other versions of XHTML.
— Nick 
Well, it’s true that there’s no particular advantage to using XHTML (unless you want to imbed some MathML)
Or inline SVG.
What these (rather tiresome) critics are saying…
What’s more tiresome are the enthusiasts, who think that serving up faux-XHTML is cutting-edge:
Habari is geared towards using the most recent, and sometimes cutting edge standards and technology that the web has to offer. Moving to HTML 4.01 would fly in the face of what we are trying to do, …
when it is, in fact, just HTML4 with a sprinkling of extraneous forward-slashes.
Which is to say that, as far as browsers are concerned, it’s just another flavour of tag-soup.
Nothing wrong with it, mind, you. Just don’t have any illusions that a blogging system designed to produce tag-soup faux-XHTML will be easily retrofitted, later, to produce real XHTML.
But the bottom line is that sending it with text/html headers is indeed valid, and creating XHTML tags in output now puts us in a better position for when it makes sense (more browsers properly
support) to send the application/xhtml+xml mime type …
Awww, I think it’s kind of cute.
P.S.- Actually, it *used* to be the case that you needed Real XHTML to serve embedded MathML and SVG. But Sam Ruby fixed that a couple of months ago: http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2006/12/05/HOWTO-Embed-MathML-and-SVG-into-HTML4.
Gosh darnit, your software auto-linked the period.