Everything you Know About XHTML Is wrong

Most people prefer XHTML syntax, that's why they use XHTML doctype in HTML documents. There's nothing wrong with it.

My issue with this draconian failure stuff is that (in Firefox at least) view source yields no content when it finds an error in page & obviously the line number it gives for the error can be very far removed from the underlying code.

Should an XHTML document start with a typical <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> header?