The technology of VPN works great for circumventing censorship. VPN can be blocked, but it’s a game of whack a mole between the state and private actors. The main vulnerability in hosted VPN is that the provider has the ability to sell you out if law enforcement comes knocking. Picking a trusted provider is key. Alternatively, there’s TOR but that isn’t perfect either, as anyone may participate in the network.

The thing with XHTML is that even a minor problem will make the page refuse to render and display a full page error message instead of any content. Having the browser guess how to handle the malformed HTML isn’t ideal, but it’s a lot better than showing nothing at all.