Steven Pemberton wrote:
...
Well, the author can say it is anything they want, but that doesn't
change what it actually is.
It is literally not possible to send XHTML5 as text/html, because as soon
as you label it as text/html, you are stating "it is HTML".
I used to think that too, but then I realised that in the real world it
is different. Browsers sniff, and media types are hard-wired into
software, rather than being an extension point. You have to row with the
This is misleading.
(1) Browsers do sniff, but not in this case. If you sent XHTML labeled
as text/html, the browser indeed processes it as HTML. That's why
there's so much broken "XHTML" content in the wild; if it indeed would
be processed as XML, it would fail.
(2) Media types are supported as extension points. I'm successfully
using that (not for something related *HTML, though).
oars you have got. As I said, I send documents with media type
text/html, not because they are necessarily HTML, but because I want
them in the browser.
...because you want them in that browser that doesn't support XHTML.
I agree that the document gets *processed* as HTML, but the document
doesn't magically change type just because it gets sent with a certain
media type.
The document itself doesn't have a type. Type information is meta
information. In HTTP, that is done using the Content-Type header. From
the filesystem, I assume browsers look at the file name to decide what
to do (but again, for *HTML, not at the content itself).
I'm not arguing about processing, I'm arguing about the document. And as
far as I am concerned, when it comes to saying what sort of document it
is, the author is most certainly normative.
How can the author be normative, when there's no place to send that
information (except, in HTTP, through the content type)?
BR, Julian
