[Standards] Re: Reinstating XHTML-IM (XEP-0071)

On Sun, 2026-03-15 at 16:42 +0000, Stephen Paul Weber wrote: I don't see how that's obvious when the current flow of XHTML-IM implementations is often 1. Parse XHTML 2. Serialize XHTML 3. Optional: Preprocess serialized XHTML with regex or string replacement to match HTML parser expectations 4. Pass XHTML to HTML parser to create annotated text 5. Pass annotated text to text renderer If we pass the (X)HTML as verbatim string, rather than XML, we get: 1. Take (X)HTML from string 2. Optional: Preprocess XHTML with regex or string replacement to match HTML parser expectations 3. Pass XHTML to HTML parser to create annotated text 4. Pass annotated text to text renderer If you want to parse XML, the reasonable thing to do is XEP-0394 which would skip the HTML parser entirely: 1. Parse XML 2. Translate to text annotations 3. Pass annotated text to text renderer This is not correct. HTML5 HTML syntax allows for self-closing tags in foreign elements (e.g. when having an svg embedded directly in the document), it does not allow for self-closing tags for HTML void elements (those that don't have a closing tag, like <img>), raw text or normal elements (which have mandatory closing tags). For void elements, it just happens that if you write <img />, the self- closing is parsed as an attribute '/' with empty string value, which has no effect. However if you do <img src=foo.png/> (which is valid in HTML, but not XML) the '/' actually becomes part of the 'src' attribute value, meaning that the file 'foo.png/' is used as src. For normal elements where a closing tag is mandatory, the unnecessary empty '/' attribute works the same, meaning the HTML parser is still waiting for the closing tag after a seamingly self-closed element. As an example <div><strong />Hey</div> will render "Hey" in bold when parsed as HTML (because the strong is not closed), but not when parsed as XHTML. https://gist.github.com/mar-v-in/7aa612d173d02240b7d2124c18670ec3 is an example file, which when you save it with .html ending and open it in a browser, it will make the last line bold, if you rename the file to .xhtml, the last line won't be bold - because the file ending is translated to an appropriate MIME type and the XML parser is triggered. I reproduced this on both Firefox and Chromium and it matches the specification. Anyway, I still haven't heard of the features and functionality that people aim to get by reinstating XHTML-IM that XEP-0394 couldn't provide as well or even better. Marvin