To avoid this deadly risk, the first design goal of XML should have been that existing valid HTML documents were well formed XML documents. The result might have been a more complex format and specification, but this risk to create a gap between XML and HTML communities would have been minimized.
Another reason to explain this failure is that XML is about extensibility. This is both its main strength and weakness: extensibility comes at a price and XML is more complex than domain specific languages. Remove the need for extensibility and XML will always loose against DSLs, we’ve seen a number of examples in the past: - RELAX NG compact syntax - JSON - HTML - N3 - CSS - … Is it a time to refactor XML? Converge or convert?
