alt Hacker NewsWe also had a brief detour into XML with XHTML, and XML has XInclude, although it's not a required feature.
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tannhaeuser • 05/04/2025
The XML subset of SGML still includes most forms of entity usage SGML has, including external general entities as described by grandparent. XInclude can include any fragment not just a complete document, but apart from that was redundant, and what remains of XInclude in HTML today (<svg href=...>) doesnt't make use of fragments and also does away with the xinclude and other namespaces. For reusing fragments OTOH, SVG has the more specific <use href=...> construct. XInclude also really worked bad in the presence of XML Schema.
It's too bad we didn't go down the XHTML/semantic web route twenty years ago.
Strict documents, reusable types, microformats, etc. would have put search into the hands of the masses rather than kept it in Google's unique domain.
The web would have been more composible and P2P. We'd have been able to slurp first class article content, comments, contact details, factual information, addresses, etc., and built a wealth of tooling.
Google / WhatWG wanted easy to author pages (~="sloppy markup, nonstandard docs") because nobody else could "organize the web" like them if it was disorganized by default.
Once the late 2010's came to pass, Google's need for the web started to wane. They directly embed lifted facts into the search results, tried to push AMP to keep us from going to websites, etc.
Google's decisions and technologies have been designed to keep us in their funnel. Web tech has been nudged and mutated to accomplish that. It's especially easy to see when the tides change.