Why does the Confluence REST api parse xhtml?

[Matt Flaherty]

I came across this question when searching for the problem I'm having: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Answers-Developer-Questions/Confluence-REST-API-gives-Error-parsing-xhtml/qaq-p/499519

But it's closed for comments. What nobody seems to ask is why is it parsing xhtml at all? Nobody wants xhtml. It is a dead standard. Confluence doesn't use the xhtml doctype. If I'm migrating content from another system into Confluence and some of those pages happen to contain unreferenced namespace prefixes, can't we just ignore it instead of chucking a 400 error? Otherwise I need to clean it all up first which is a pain. I don't think the content created through the api needs to be xhtml, so I don't get this.

[Gonchik Tsymzhitov]

Hi @Matt Flaherty ,

Welcome into professional software development process. 

1. Confluence is old project. 

2.  Confluence is not used pure xhtml, use the customized one. 

Each time you need to calculate the money of changing standards, or features. 

Also, time to time. some standards go away, as world as changed. but legacy product will work and continue work. 

i.e. at the moment

• GraphQL is latest greatest way. 
• REST API is just old. 
• SOAP - is super old. 

So background includes the same concepts and a polishes. 

Therefore I would say it's "holy war" thing

[Matt Flaherty]

The war is over. xhtml lost a long time ago. html5 won, again a long time ago. Confluence declares the html5 doc type in its own page source. I've been involved in the professional software development process for more than 25 years, but thank you anyway for the greeting. Honestly, I have not used the GraphQL API and I wasn't even aware of it. I'll give it a try, so thanks. REST is not going away, so it would be nice to see that API maintained in a commercial software product.