since when is the complexity of the (mini)-browser a requirement for anyone, except the browser manufacturers?
The real requirement is simplicity for developers and content authors. When it comes to this, HTML wins hands down over XHTML. In fact, the pure XML-based WML was hard to code for most and failed when you least expected it even on sites which were supposed to be built by professionals.
At the same time (2000), iMode (compact HTML) was allowing japanese people (i.e. not only developers) to build pages with their favorite text editor and the Internet Explorer reload button. The result was tens of thoudands of iMode sites and millions of happy iMode users.

Time to get a clue, guys?

Luca

you can fix the holes @@@@

Simon Pieters: I did a test for WAP Forum. I had 20 phones myself. All browsers (except opera) were using an HTML parser only, also for XML content.
Anne van Kesteren: Why would they do this?
Simon: Because they want to be compatible with the Web.
Anne: You mean they don’t want to support two webs or just one of them?
Simon: I don’t know. They want to support everything that people threw out, I guess.
Anne: Well, I guess if I was using a mobile phone, I would like to visit BBC.co.uk as well.
Simon: Indeed.
Anne: @@@@
Simon: Webkit also supports XHTML but the Nokia forked it to not support XHTML. It uses the html parser also for XML content.
Anne: At Opera, we should do something better.
Simon: Right, Opera uses the xml parser but this is, of course, causing problems for us because…
Anne: Actually, yeah, I have seen bug reports. Fair enough.
Simon: Of course, people are creating xml or xhtml pages that are not well-formed so and they work in other browsers but not in opera.
Anne: So these browsers basically force, if you get an xml mimetype to use instead the html parser,
Simon: Yeah, at least for mobiles.
Anne: but that kind of limit my abilities to use xml on the Web, right?
Simon: indeed. You can’t use xml only features for mobile browsers anymore because mobile browsers are forced to use html parsers for compatibilities.
Anne: Why mobile browsers were doing XHMTL in the first place?
Simon: That’s a good question because evidently they can support html because everyone does it. If people were using html instead, everything work fine and people could be using xml features because
Anne: so so was there someone promoting this xhtml mobile thing? because they could @@@@ someone behind it.
Simon: The W3C has these best practices and mobile profile and whatever XHTML basic,
Anne:
Simon: they did this before XHTML
Anne: @@@@ they forked the Web
Simon: I guess
Anne: So why are they promoting xhtml? is it bad?
Simon: not really.
Anne: Personally I heard that the parsing would be somehow expensive for something… this is an argument which comes often on blogs.
Simon: yeah indeed. The theory goes like html parsing is very expensive and therefore you can use “lightweight” xml parsers on mobiles to work better, but all browsers are using html parsers anyway and not an xml parser and also parsing is like the most trivial thing in a browser, the rendering, the DOM, and dynamic updates and everything is much more expensive.
Anne: Yeah I guess, Ecmascript execution… layout… I can see where this is going. So basically parsers are cheap…
Simon: yes
Anne: and the other things are more complex.
Simon: It is trivial to have both an html parser and an xml parser in a constrained browser.
Anne: ok. So we can’t use xhtml, so I guess the W3C, sort of, by promoting this xml thing really hard on the mobile phones, while the mobile phones actually didn’t do the xml thing, they basically dig the XML grave.
Simon: indeed. @@@@ authors relying on html parsers for xml content
Anne: So basically, the mobile browsers were craped because of the propaganda. Then authors coding against this crap and then the better browsers are forced to also become crap. All are forced to do this in a html way.
Simon: They can’t use xml parsers.
Anne: Standards do suck.
Simon: Indeed.

Furthermore, keep this up, it’s a lot of fun.