Michael Kay mentioned this w/re to XSLT 2.0's "XHTML" output mode in response to a question "why have it at all"
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/guidelines.html
My thought going in was that most of the demands for special dispensation were made by older browsers and are on the way to being irrelevant (like space before the slash in self closing br's) and for some things that's true.
Section c.4 brought up issues with me. Are there XML-based user agents or is this an as-yet hypothetical audience? Can parsers really throw out comments? I didn't think they could... certainly you can read comments in a DOM or XSL model...
C.8 was new to me and useful going forward...
C.11 is hilarious and disturbing at the same time. Add "the past" to "the end user" in the list of things it would be easier to ignore when building software.
Dated: 11/14/2005