Products · Product
XHTML
Raised as a usability problem by 9 people on Hacker News over 11 years (2016–2026), in 8 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Strict XHTML errors arcane, hard to find the real problemUnreviewed
20162026- Broken XHTML served a blank error page with no content or way to report it2026-05-09
- Strict XHTML errors were arcane, so authors had to dig to find the actual problem2025-10-12
- Valid documents show error pages because browsers needed different headers and doctypes for XHTML2025-08-23
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 9 complaints
- Broken XHTML served a blank error page with no content or way to report it2026-05-09
- Browsers show a user-hostile error page when a closing tag is missed2026-01-11
- Strict XHTML errors were arcane, so authors had to dig to find the actual problem2025-10-12
- Valid documents show error pages because browsers needed different headers and doctypes for XHTML2025-08-23
- Browsers need correct server content-type headers, which is a pain on shared hosting2022-05-02
- One forgotten closing tag makes the whole page fail2020-12-14
- One forgotten closing tag breaks the whole page2020-12-13
- Standard designed without browser implementers, unusable for real-world content2019-05-28
- Browsers show a blank page on errors, and the validator gives unhelpful feedback2016-08-10