Carol, For one thing, as Patrick put it so well: [quote] I was suggesting that simply saying "the W3C use it on their site" is not an argument that holds too much weight. [/quote]
Also, per the terminology defined by RFC 2119, none of the terms used for specifying MIME types are anything more than recommendations. It's really more of a best practices sort of question, as the XHTML Media types document states: [quote] Authors who wish to support both XHTML and HTML user agents MAY utilize content negotiation by serving HTML documents as 'text/html' and XHTML documents as 'application/xhtml+xml'. Also note that it is not necessary for XHTML documents served as 'application/xhtml+xml' to follow the HTML Compatibility Guidelines. [/quote] That's the entire point I was making in my first response, when I said I didn't understand why people send XHTML as text/html, when it's so very simple to use content negotiation to serve HTML 4.01 as text/html to UAs that can't handle XHTML sent as application/xhtml+xml (the proper way). I don't know if you read the article I linked to by Ian Hickson, but he brings across some very important points about serving XHTML as text/html. Basically, what it boils down to for me, is a lack of understanding as to why everybody who is jumping on the web standards bandwagon, with the desire as I understand it, to "do things the right way" - overlook or ignore the whole MIME type issue. I'll be the first to admit, when I first started with the web standards way of doing web pages, I served my XHTML pages as text/html, simply because I wasn't aware of the MIME type issue. Just seems odd to me (and even as far as the W3C site goes - but hey... how can you say what they're going to do next huh?) that the same people that tout web standards as the way to go, because it's the right way to do things, seem not to want to go all the way. (Also, I'll be the first to admit also that not all of the pages on all of the sites I maintain are using content negotiation - some are still XHTML being served as text/html). Always remember also - HTML 4.01 is still a valid standard - albeit not the newest one. Well, that's about the end of my little rant for now. Off for a four day weekend and to celebrate my birthday - take care :) Collin Davis Web Architect Stromberg Architectural Products 903.454.0904 e [EMAIL PROTECTED] w http://www.strombergarchitectural.com -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Carol Doersom Sent: Friday, March 25, 2005 7:32 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [WSG] XML Declaration Collin, Then why would W3C use it on their own site? This is the first 4 lines of their source code for their home page: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd";> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"; xml:lang="en-US" lang="en-US"> <head profile="http://www.w3.org/2000/08/w3c-synd/#";><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> I'm not being argumentative....just curious. -- Carol ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
