It is plain wrong to make a standard easier for machine-parsing at the expense of humans who are typing it in.
It is far worse to sacrifice consistency of the mental model behind the language for the sake of not typing two extra characters.
Core XML is much easier to read than modern HTML, because you can read it without knowing the context of what you're looking at and without memorizing tons of exceptions. It's easier to parse for the same reason.
Also, the savings on avoiding " /" are offset by the need to needlessly close some of the HTML5 tags.
The only really stupid things in XML I remember is the need to do checked="checked" and people using namespace prefixes on every tag. It's pretty obvious how to fix the former. The latter is entirely avoidable if you have a fully working parser.
It is far worse to sacrifice consistency of the mental model behind the language for the sake of not typing two extra characters.
Core XML is much easier to read than modern HTML, because you can read it without knowing the context of what you're looking at and without memorizing tons of exceptions. It's easier to parse for the same reason.
Also, the savings on avoiding " /" are offset by the need to needlessly close some of the HTML5 tags.
The only really stupid things in XML I remember is the need to do checked="checked" and people using namespace prefixes on every tag. It's pretty obvious how to fix the former. The latter is entirely avoidable if you have a fully working parser.