* Numien <num...@deathwyrm.com> [2010-01-06 22:40]: > Well, the XHTML 1.0 spec says you can serve XHTML as > "text/html"
Yes. <http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/>: The 'text/html' media type [RFC2854] is primarily for HTML, not for XHTML. In general, this media type is NOT suitable for XHTML except when the XHTML conforms to the guidelines in Appendix A. In particular, 'text/html' is NOT suitable for XHTML Family document types that add elements and attributes from foreign namespaces, such as XHTML+MathML [XHTML+MathML]. > with the appropriate DOCTYPE What the DOCTYPE says is utterly irrelevant. The *only* thing browsers do with the DOCTYPE is switch CSS interpretation and a few Javascript edge cases from Quirks Mode (AKA IE5 compat) to Standards Mode if *a* DOCTYPE is declared. However, they care *not one whit* about *what* the DOCTYPE is. > and browsers are supposed to interpret it using XHTML rules... No. <http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/>: XHTML documents served as 'text/html' will not be processed as XML [XML10], e.g., well-formedness errors may not be detected by user agents. Also be aware that HTML rules will be applied for DOM and style sheets (see guidelines 11 and 13). > which it looks like Firefox isn't doing completely, Not completely, nor AT ALL -- and entirely correctly so. If the MIME type is `text/html`, then the document is parsed and is *supposed* to be parsed as tag soup. End of story. If you serve XHTML 1.0 documents with `text/html`, you are not serving valid XHTML, you are serving malformed HTML 4. The W3C validator, ironically, respects the DOCTYPE over the MIME type and suggests that you really *are* serving valid XHTML even though this contradicts the spec and even though every browser in the world follows the spec on this point. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
