Designer wrote:
Lachlan Hunt wrote:
Designer wrote:
Incidentally, I would be interested in any browsers you know which won't support application/xhtml+xml, apart from IE of course.

http://www.w3.org/People/mimasa/test/xhtml/media-types/results

Thanks, Lachlan. I studied the list, and the only failing browsers I saw were Opera prior to v7.10 (in some versions the type selector in style sheets matched case-insensitively) Amaya (well surely Amaya users are the type to upgrade to later versions, which are OK) and iCAB, the latter's only problem being the style sheet case mentioned above.

So, as far as I can see, if you have all your style sheets in lower case, the only problem is IE. If so, the selective feeding to IE should be fine. Does anyone know why this wouldn't be the case? If not, is this a new 'hack'?

No, because of the case sensitivity bug several browsers have (especially iCab) and the other reasons I mentioned before regarding browser Accept headers which would result in those browsers receiving HTML, not XHTML, and that would include users that have modified their browser's Accept header. A browser's Accept header and its support for XHTML cannot be used as an indication of its CSS abilities.

In Firefox, this can be set with the pref network.http.accept.default and some users may have modified it to prefer HTML because of its inability to incrementally render XHTML.

iCab's accept header by default contains this:
  text/html;q=0.9,application/xhtml+xml;q=0.7

Safari's accept header contains just */*. If you were using Apache Multiviews (which selects files based on the file extension and chooses the files alphabetically in the event that checking all other criteria didn't result in a single preference) then the .html file would be chosen over the .xhtml file. Simply changing the file extensions to put the XHTML file alphabetically before HTML is not an option because then IE users would also receive the XHTML file.

Also keep in mind that that list is not a complete list of every browser, there may be others that don't support XHTML, do support stylesheets and are still in use by some people.

--
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/

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