XHTML 2 vs. HTML 5
Work on XHTML 2.0 began shortly after XHTML 1.1 became a recommendation in 2001. The first XHTML 2.0 working draft was released in 2002, but much of the document was in a non-normative, incomplete state (some still is). By 2004, some prominent industry stakeholders - browser vendors, web developers, designers, and content owners - had grown unhappy with the direction of the XHTML2 working group. Citing the closed nature of the W3C process, they decided to start over and develop their own standard.
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