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 PMIt'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 AMI 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