I remember just using PHP sessions back then on a XHTML document produced parse errors. Because PHP added the session to the query strings of links and used the raw & character instead of & for separating params in the query string. Thus causing a XML parse error.
There was a push to prevent browsers to be too lenient with the syntax in order to avoid the problem that sloppy HTML produced (inconsistent rendering across browsers)
It's not that there was a push for the browsers to be lenient - I worked on a browser team. We didn't want the leniency. We hated it. We wanted a strict parser. I was a pro XHTML guy - I was eventually argued into submission with a very simple and great point: "If we can't parse the whole Web and our competitors can, people will stop using us."
Like, there was no choice in the matter - it was give the market what it wants, or die. Any "push" came from observing user needs and how many people we'd break and drive away with strictness.
Competition mandated compatibility. Engineers might want purity, but users don't want a browser that barfs on malformed pages. Remember that one of HTML's basic principles was to be more lax about syntax than XML. The Web had committed to being syntax-relaxed from day 1. Not caring about markup correctness helped the Web win.
It took me a while to see why it had to be this way, but I was eventually convinced, XHTML would have departed from both what the Web was designed to be and what users wanted it to be.
I wouldn't even know how to prompt the complex queries I have in mind. For simple queries that an ORM could write, I see, but for something complex that generates actual data from the tables, I don't see it coming.
For my work I use SQL pretty extensively, the PostGreSQL flavor, and it's really powerful. I wonder how it is possible to do without except for very simple queries where the ORM might kind of work.
There is however a weakness of SQL is that it's purely declarative and it's difficult to make sure it does the right thing. I often find myself in front of queries that are badly optimized and I'd welcome a language that would be less declarative where you could tell the database engine which index you want to use and how explicitly. The optimizer has table metrics but with the domain specific knowledge the programmer has generally better insights.
I'm not surprised at the powers of htmx. I have been doing single page apps (or close to) using Rails + Hotwire (Stimulus/Turbo) and it works really well.
most things work (better) on the server. makes sense to shift back there. React served a purpose, making the web feel more interactive in the early 2010s, but it's not an all in one solution. moreover, the web is just a frankenstein...
The only thing I remember is that I would never install SP2 because of EULA. I don't remember the specifics though. Around that time I started mostly using Linux anyway.
