By way of background, web2py generates xhtml pages, with these doctypes (I'm not clear on why one or the other is chosen; perhaps someone could enlighten me):
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd "> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd " The problem is, web2py's xhtml is not, by and large, valid. This ought to cause a problem, because xhtml parsers aren't allowed to handle invalid markup. We get away with it because essentially all servers present our pages as html, not xhtml, and our browsers parse it as html, which is more forgiving. (One of the better explanations of all this is: <http://webkit.org/blog/2006/09/20/understanding-html-xml-and-xhtml/ >.) Here's an illustration. With a standards-compliant browser (I'm using Safari 4.0.1 and Firefox 3.5 on OS X), have a look at these pages: http://www.web2py.com/examples/spreadsheet http://lobitos.net/w2p/w2p.html http://lobitos.net/w2p/w2p.xhtml They're identical (I copied the first one, changing only some URLs to be absolute instead of relative). You should see that your browser won't display the third version. Why? Because the first two are served as "Content-Type: text/html", while the third is served as "Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml". This is how Apache handles .html and .xhtml files by default. Notice that the browser pays attention to the Content-Type header and ignores the DOCTYPE (the w3 validator looks at DOCTYPE, though). Notice also that the browser is ignoring the "<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />" line; it really does believe the http header: not the doctype, not the meta. So. Why use the XHTML DOCTYPE? The main reason that I can think of is that the resulting document, if valid, has a DTD and can be parsed as XML. Not by the browser, which is going to parse it as bad html, but by someone else, maybe. But that reason only holds water if the document is actually *valid* xhtml. (Another note: this is the spreadsheet application, but the same thing would happen with many, perhaps most, web2py pages, certainly any with <form action="">. You can try the same experiment with other pages.) What to do? In my view, there's a short-term answer and a long-term answer. And they're both complicated by legacy compatibility issues, which I'll take the liberty of ignoring here. In the short term, fix the output to be valid XHTML. This is easier if you use transitional rather than strict. In the long term, move to HTML. Given that it looks like XHTML2 has been abandoned, the future standard is going to be HTML5. Not very soon, since browsers are only starting to support it, and the FSM only knows when Microsoft will get around to it, but eventually, since HTML5 has a lot of nifty features. Me, I've settled on HTML4 Transitional for anything I've got control over, using XHTML only for a couple of pages that I need to parse as XML. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "web2py Web Framework" group. To post to this group, send email to web2py@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to web2py+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/web2py?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
