Is sending XHTML as text/html harmful?

[Highway of Life]

Wow, there is someone who never wants to worry about progress with the web.
So they just make up their own reasons why it would be bad to use XHTML, and call themselves brilliant.

I think I’m going to stick with XHTML 1.0, since my demographic consists of users who are tech-savvy (Firefox 2, 3, IE 6 & 7, Wii, Opera 8+, etc), not users who have IE 4 and Netscape 3.

[link92]

Wow, there is someone who never wants to worry about progress with the web.
So they just make up their own reasons why it would be bad to use XHTML, and call themselves brilliant.

Yeah. The W3C know nothing.

[Highway of Life]

Yeah. The W3C know nothing.

I’m not referring to them, but the author of one of the HTML 4.0 articles... BTW, which was not viewable properly in a certain latest browser.

I should say that IE7 will not add support for this MIME type [application/xml+xhtml]– we will, of course, continue to read XHTML when served as “text/html”, presuming it follows the HTML compatibility recommendations. We fixed the problem with our DOCTYPE switch explicitly so that this mechanism is easier to use, and it is generally easy to set up most servers to conditionally serve content as “text/html” when the “application/xml+xhtml” MIME type is not supported.
...
I made the decision to not try to support the MIME type in IE7 simply because I personally want XHTML to be successful in the long run.

As long as the pages are delivered in text/html, you’re going to be fine using XHTML, it’s not reason enough to revert back to HTML 4.0 standards, unless you really need to serve the content in another format.

[link92]

Yeah. The W3C know nothing.

I’m not referring to them, but the author of one of the HTML 4.0 articles... BTW, which was not viewable properly in a certain latest browser.

Which article? All of them render as per the specs say they should be here…

I should say that IE7 will not add support for this MIME type [application/xml+xhtml]– we will, of course, continue to read XHTML when served as “text/html”, presuming it follows the HTML compatibility recommendations. We fixed the problem with our DOCTYPE switch explicitly so that this mechanism is easier to use, and it is generally easy to set up most servers to conditionally serve content as “text/html” when the “application/xml+xhtml” MIME type is not supported.
...
I made the decision to not try to support the MIME type in IE7 simply because I personally want XHTML to be successful in the long run.

As long as the pages are delivered in text/html, you’re going to be fine using XHTML, it’s not reason enough to revert back to HTML 4.0 standards, unless you really need to serve the content in another format.

You are relying on the UA being broken serving XHTML as text/html. Any UA that actually follows the spec will treat the solidus as a NET (as per the SGML spec). As I've already questioned, XHTML as text/html brings no advantages over HTML as text/html, only the disadvantage of relying on UAs breaking the spec.

[SHS`]

Let me ask this one question: what advantages are there to sending XHTML as text/html over HTML as text/html?

Simple, mixed mode (ie: multiple namespaces... XHTML+SVG+MathML) XML documents.

http://lambcutlet.org/files/test-cases/ ... thml.xhtml

[link92]

Let me ask this one question: what advantages are there to sending XHTML as text/html over HTML as text/html?

Simple, mixed mode (ie: multiple namespaces... XHTML+SVG+MathML) XML documents.

http://lambcutlet.org/files/test-cases/ ... thml.xhtml

That needs to be sent as XML though, so that isn't an advantage for XHTML as text/html!

[jojobarjo32]

Code: Select all

<!--[if IE]>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<![endif]-->
<!--[if !IE]><-->
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8" />
<!--><![endif]-->

Isn't that code a good solution ?

[link92]

No, there are other UAs that don't support application/xhtml+xml (the next biggest after IE is GoogleBot). Also, even though in theory <meta> elements should be read by the server, no server does so.

The real issue with XHTML as text/html persists even with that – it's just being parsed as malformed HTML, and any compliant UA would cause all kinds of chaos with null end tags (eg. <p/test/ is the same as <p>test</p>, therefore <img src="img1.gif" /><img src="img2.gif" /> is the same as <img src="img1.gif" >><img src="img2.gif"></img>>).