Reply to sibling: “Did any browser reject poorly formed XHTML?” Yes, they did, if the XHTML was served with a MIME type of application/xhtml+xml.
However, this MIME type was extremely rare because MSIE would not show a web page unless the MIME type was text/html.
Furthermore, the extreme brittleness of XHTML was generally regarded as a Bad Move as one single URL in your source code with a literal ampersand instead of & would cause a complete and total breakage of your web page. Of course, many web pages are crummily concatenated strings and there are a lot of web devs who would never be able to reliably generate 100% XHTML-compliant output. Shit, pasting in a snippet of HTML where the BR tags omitted the self-closing slash would break your XHTML validation.
However, this MIME type was extremely rare because MSIE would not show a web page unless the MIME type was text/html.
Furthermore, the extreme brittleness of XHTML was generally regarded as a Bad Move as one single URL in your source code with a literal ampersand instead of & would cause a complete and total breakage of your web page. Of course, many web pages are crummily concatenated strings and there are a lot of web devs who would never be able to reliably generate 100% XHTML-compliant output. Shit, pasting in a snippet of HTML where the BR tags omitted the self-closing slash would break your XHTML validation.
tl;dr: Yes, and it sucked