Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No need for / in HTML I personally prefer having the /> even though it's not necessary, so that I can tell at-a-glance whether a tag is self-closing or not. It doesn't hurt, does it? (plus I'm just used to it because the book I learned HTML from was confident that XHTML was the future)
I strongly believe that the harm we experienced from XHTML should not be passed down to future generations.
I've always been completely baffled by the rejection of xhtml. It gave a way to extend html with new elements and a simple, powerful client side templating language with xslt. The "reason" for which I remember it being rejected was that allegedly web devs couldn't wrap their heads around closing tags and explicit attribute values, which seems crazy to me. Then a few years later typescript took off (which is way more complicated) and react gave a pretend way to write xml except now you need a compiler/build pipeline, and everyone loved it.
xhtml still works in modern browsers btw. It's still probably the easiest way to do page templates. XSLT shows its age without the ability to modify the page after load (unless you run it via javascript), but we could've just added that and it'd be almost perfect.