As Jeffrey Zeldman puts it in his recent blog post – XHTML is dead, kinda.

W3C announced a few days ago that the XHTML2 working group will likely be closed down by the end of the year, and focus will be shifted to the development and polishing of the HTML5 standard (which also offers an XML flavour).

To me, this is a quite welcome change – it never made much sense to me to have two competing standards for documents, especially when all the original XHTML standard did was to enforce strict syntax rules (which are rather arbitrary given what is actually allowed under XML itself). This tightening up could easily have been dealt with in HTML4.1, say – and with less problems with Internet Explorer (which is still having problems dealing with properly served XML/XHTML documents even after 9 years).

Now, with the HTML5 development, it all comes back together into a single standard again. Sure, there a few differences between HTML5 and XHTML5 – but less than between HTML4 and XHTML1.1. These differences, however, a easily overcome by applying some of the restricted behaviour allowed in XML documents to HTML (things like not using document.write() and so on).

Anyway – hopefully, this dropping of XHTML2 will result in a better developed combined standard, and this will help browsers to move towards adopting that new standard as soon as possible.