To be honest, in my recollection, in 2013 what the W3C was doing was actually seen as user hostile and HTML5 was seen as a good thing for users.

Part of the community really hated XHTML and its strictness. I remember Mozilla being at the vanguard then rather than Google.

I think the situation was and is a lot more messy and complicated than what the article presents but presenting it fully would make for a less compelling narrative.

As is I don’t really buy it personally.

Hostile actions would be IE’s strategy for monopolizing browser in 90s and Google paying Apple and Mozilla to monopolize search starting in 2004, killing off Reader in 2013.

Taking over standards groups is a gray area with tradeoffs. It helped Google preserve monopoly in search but clearly devs and the web benefited as well.

XHTML2 was panned because it was super strict without clear benefits. Keeping HTML backwards compatible is clearly a very good thing. I don’t fully understand the author’s passion for XSLT- it’s cumbersome and it wasn’t popular with devs.

I agree with the headline and some aspects but XML is a bad hill to die on and much of the writing is hyperbolic and more than a little out of touch.

I've been there at the time, and the pushback against XHTML always struck me as disingenuous. XHTML was not at all difficult to write! The only real argument against it was that it wasn't always valid HTML, and browsers didn't want to support it specifically, so when people published XHTML pages it would sometimes break if the browser tried to interpret it as HTML. But they have broken HTML backwards compatibility so much worse many times since then...

I do agree reality was a lot more messy, but i also think it still paints a compelling case that Google in particular acted how it did (mostly) to shape the web to its own best interests.

That it wasn't literally "Google railroaded WHATWG/W3C/everyone else to get what it wanted" doesn't mean Google didn't take advantage of the situation to kill open web standards to its own benefit. I imagine Mozilla, for instance, went along with as much as they did because Google accounted for most of their revenue.

> Part of the community really hated XHTML and its strictness.

A big part of this is that people were concatenating XML together manually, to predictable disaster.

Nowadays they use JSX and TypeScript, far more strict than XML ever was, and absolutely love it.