XHTML lost, we decided that we preferred tag-soup, and keeping our past documents readable. Besides that, most XHTML came with a HTML mimetype, which meant it wasn't being read as XHTML. So the best bits, lighter parses, and XML embedding, were never usable.
I don't understand how there's much of any difference in readability between html and xhtml style of coding. Do closing tags really make it that much more difficult to read for some people?
There isn't a difference in readability, XHTML is just stricter. Much of the HTML that exists is invalid HTML/XHTML, and the XML parser used for XHTML would simply error out. Most XHTML pages were served as HTML, due to mimetypes being wrongly configured, so no-one ever noticed.
The XML parser was supposed to be faster, and allow any XML to be embedded in the XHTML (SVG, MathML, etc). This stuff was designed to change the shape of the web (especially since mobile phones weren't very powerful in those days).
I can see your point for the post I was responding to, but I've numerous posts throughout the page that seem to be debating over human readability as well.
