Lennart Jablonka dixit: >> Yes, but then it MUST send HTML-compatible things or it’s not >> an XHTML page. As simple as that. (I also serve my XHTML as >> text/html always and just write it in compatible mode.) > > I don’t buy this. What is and isn’t XHTML isn’t dependent on what the > client declares it can handle.
Oh, but XHTML ≠ XHTML. There’s HTML-compatible XHTML, which you can serve as text/html, and there’s nōn-HTML-compatible XHTML, which you must serve as application/xhtml+xml, and if you expect to serve websites you may serve the latter only if explicitly requested by the browser because the browser needs to be able to handle this, and e.g. NCSA Mosaic won’t know how to do that. > Please help me understand why you think that, > with a citation perhaps. It’s split over the XHTML and HTTP standard and the DTDs. Even pure XML documents that… ←←← Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth Edition) (p34 of 94) Tags for Empty Elements [44] EmptyElemTag ::= '<' [392]Name ([393]S [394]Attribute)* [395]S? '/>' [396][WFC: Unique Att Spec] Empty-element tags may be used for any element which has no content, whether or not it is declared using the keyword EMPTY. [397]For interoperability, the empty-element tag SHOULD be used, and SHOULD only be used, for elements which are declared EMPTY. In the end effect, though, who cares about standards, what you need to care about is browser compatibility. That being said the standards do explicitly make room for browser compatibility as outlined in the above snippet and referenced standards. OK, here’s a snippet from the XHTML standard for this: XHTML 1.0: The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Editi... (p22 of 39) 5. Compatibility Issues This section is normative. Although there is no requirement for XHTML 1.0 documents to be compatible with existing user agents, in practice this is easy to accomplish. Guidelines for creating compatible documents can be found in [132]Appendix C. 5.1. Internet Media Type XHTML Documents which follow the guidelines set forth in [133]Appendix C, "HTML Compatibility Guidelines" may be labeled with the Internet Media Type "text/html" [[134]RFC2854], as they are compatible with most HTML browsers. Those documents, and any other document conforming to this specification, may also be labeled with the Internet Media Type "application/xhtml+xml" as defined in [[135]RFC3236]. For further This normatively underlines what I wrote above. Happy? Now excuse me, I’m kinda busy with $dayjob and in no way obligated to do your research for you. bye, //mirabilos -- <igli> exceptions: a truly awful implementation of quite a nice idea. <igli> just about the worst way you could do something like that, afaic. <igli> it's like anti-design. <mirabilos> that too… may I quote you on that? <igli> sure, tho i doubt anyone will listen ;)