August 29, 2003

Validation

Today, I got into a debate, trying to persuade someone on IRC that XHTML as text/html is bad. The person eventually pointed out to me that my blog was guilty of sending XHTML as text/html. I just now changed it to send valid HTML 4.01, but I think it really sucks that the default MovableType templates use XHTML sent as text/html (explicitly via meta tags). Someone should tell them it is considered harmful.

Posted by caillon at August 29, 2003 6:28 PM
Comments

Actually, for compatibility reasons it appears that the XHTML spec does allow one to serve XHTML as text/html instead of application/xhtml+xml

See http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#media

Whether it's "harmful" or not is still open for debate, but it is allowed. And needed, if you're to keep IE compatibility and serve up XHTML.

Posted by: andy at August 29, 2003 8:38 PM

It's only allowed if you follow Appendix C. Most people who serve it that way do not. In fact most documents with an XHTML doctype that are served as text/html are not even well-formed.

Posted by: Boris at August 30, 2003 8:06 AM

I am of the opinion that sending XHTML 1.0 as text/html is okay (following the appendix) but defeats the purpose. I recently moved to XHTML 1.1 which I serve to accepting browsers as application/xhtml+xml, others get text/html.

Posted by: Ben at September 2, 2003 9:47 AM