>Did any browser ever reject a Web page just because it wasn't well-formed XHTML?
Of course. If you served XHTML properly (by setting "application/xhtml+xml" MIME type), ill-formed XHTML would just show you a big syntax error instead of the page. Try it, that's still the case.
Even when being well-formed, lots of sites still used "text/html" type to trigger HTML (SGML) parser instead of XML one, as any 3rd party code embedded into the website would of course crash the page as well.
That was one of the reasons why XHTML never got popular and eventually has been abandoned.
That still wasn't serious enough. All it took to get browsers to accept non-XHTML pages was to change the MIME type. What I'm talking about is simply not displaying ill-formed pages at all, under any circumstances.
But with that MIME type it wasn't XHTML at all. It was being parsed as HTML which was possible only because of big similarity between those two formats. All you need to ensure the behavior you want is to disable HTML parsing (which is pretty much ensures being liberal in what the parser accepts already in its specification).
Of course. If you served XHTML properly (by setting "application/xhtml+xml" MIME type), ill-formed XHTML would just show you a big syntax error instead of the page. Try it, that's still the case.
Even when being well-formed, lots of sites still used "text/html" type to trigger HTML (SGML) parser instead of XML one, as any 3rd party code embedded into the website would of course crash the page as well.
That was one of the reasons why XHTML never got popular and eventually has been abandoned.