>Not quite:
>
>Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii
>
><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
> "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
>
>We are advised against using text/html for xhtml.
>From the W3C recomendation for XHTML 1.0
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#media ):
5.1 Internet Media Type
As of the publication of this recommendation, the general recommended MIME
labeling for XML-based applications has yet to be resolved.
However, XHTML Documents which follow the guidelines set forth in Appendix
C, "HTML Compatibility Guidelines" may be labeled with the Internet Media
Type "text/html", as they are compatible with most HTML browsers. This
document makes no recommendation about MIME labeling of other XHTML
documents.
So why is it that using XHTML Transitional is so wrong? Somebody said
something somewhere about tag soup, but I don't know what that was meant to
mean. I know that there may be no technical advantage in using XHTML 1 over
HTML 4, but I can't see that there is any technical dissadvantage either,
and saying that you can change it all once XML has become common place, does
not seem valid to me. I do however think that regardless of their being few
real *technical* differences, it has to be in mozilla.org's favour to be
seen to be using the cutting edge standards *now*, since mozilla is supposed
to be the standards compliant browser.
The best solution IMHO would be the following:
* Docs are submitted in some form of simple markup language (Docbook seems
like a good idea to me, as, if I understand correctly, it places lots of
emphasis on the structure, and very little on the layout, which makes it
easy for other people to customise the look and feel for thier own use in
any format, be it web based or otherwise) - Again, since this is an XML
application (am I right here?) we appear to be on the cutting edge.
* These docs are converted into XHTML by a script, with a standard Style
Sheet. The script can add some mozilla.org structural stuff to the tops and
bottoms of the file, maybe encapsulating it in a table - maybe not. The
files are put onto the webserver, served as text/html (which can be changes
easily enough later), and just for good measure the W3C validator is run
over it (since it doesn't mind about the MIME type). The Docbook (or
whatever) files are tarballed and squirreled away in a download section
somewhere, along with postscript, pdf, text etc. etc. versions.
I'm not trying to stir up arguments here, I really do just want to know what
is wrong with any of the above. Since I am working on something slightly
simillar for my own website, I really do have an interest in the problems in
using XHTML.
Thanks,
psr
