Vlad Alexander (XStandard) wrote: >Russ wrote: >[quote] >At the risk of being burned at the stake, I think that unless you are willing >to serve your pages as application/xhtml+xml with content negotiation, then >you are probably better off staying with HTML 4.01 at this time. >[/quote] > >Let me be the first to gather the kindling :-) > >The whole MIME debate started with Ian Hickson. Let me summarize his argument: >If you author bad XHTML and serve it up as HTML, you won't know that you have >invalid XHTML and you will blame XHTML when you find out. Sorry, this is not a >valid argument. This is fear mongering. > > That might not be a valid argument but that was not Ian's argument (if I remember it properly). Here's what I think he was saying
1) the whole point of XHTML, is that it is xml and that it requires well-formedness 2) if you do not server application/xhtml-xml you don't gain that an you may as well be using HTML 4.01 3) additionally, sending XHTML with an HTML mime type is against standards, just as much as having a & instead of & 4) because it is against standards, you can't expect standard behaviour from browsers. In reality they should all be putting a > after your <br/>'s and <input/>'s and such (but only a one or two browsers actually implement that). I know the PHP DOM parser screws up when you give it a text/html file with an xhtml namespace. For all intensive purposes, you file will just be an oddly written html file with an incorrect namespace and incorrect dtd. The only time I find this is useful is when your sending content to a UA that does not support application/xhtml-xml and you don't want to rewrite your document for that. Alan Trick __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
