> Not really; the DOCTYPE still tells the browser that it's XHTML. DOCTYPEs do not matter in this case. Browsers do switch rendering modes depending on doctypes, but the only thing that influences the choice of parser is MIME type [1]
> Most browsers have no problem. IE is the exception, sort of. All the browsers, IE or not, will treat XHTML document served as text/html. And no, IE does not understand XHTML with MIME type of text/xhtml+xml. And yes, <element /> means completely different thing in SGML and hence HTML. If browsers were treating this correctly you'd see ">" scattered all over the "xhtml" documents. Sure, no vendor will now risk to fix this. By the way, Gecko 1.9 in source view shows "/" in red i.e. as error if page uses xhtml syntax and is served with html MIME type. > Anyway, XHTML is a cleaner standard than HTML -- since it's 100% > well-formed XML, it's easier to parse and more extensible. There is > absolutely no reason *not* to use XHTML for all your output. You are > creating a problem out of thin air. Except that all browser will parse your xhtml served as text/html with their HTML parser, hence none of the above benefits will apply. Semantically XHTML has no advantages over HTML 4—it is the same spec reformulated in XML. Serving with proper MIME type you will once again hit the problem that IE does not support it. Also there are other issues, and sadly, majority of XHTML users who chose it because "Zeldman told so" are not aware about them [2,3,4]. It is very unfortunate, that RoR chose this path. Especially now, when some may want to use HTML5. [1] http://annevankesteren.nl/2004/07/mime [2] http://hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml [3] http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200501/the_perils_of_using_xhtml_properly/ [4] http://lachy.id.au/log/2005/12/xhtml-beginners Regards, Rimantas -- http://rimantas.com/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
