Hi,
I apologize, but restrictions on public access to Apache's Bugzilla make it 
very burdensome to look for an existing issue report.

Anywho, I think there's a problem with Apache's localized error pages that 
webmasters can elect to enable which are kept in the source tree, such as
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/httpd/httpd/trunk/docs/error/HTTP_NOT_FOUND.html.var

This uses Server-Side Includes and you can see these templates specify 
"Content-Type: text/html". However the document heading is pulled in from 
"include/top.html", and one can see at 
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/httpd/httpd/trunk/docs/error/include/top.html 
that the document inherits both the XHTML namespace and the "XHTML Strict" 
document type declaration.

This is wrong: if it's intended to be XML-compatible the *.html.var templates 
should be updated to have "Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml". If these are 
supposed to be served as HTML documents then include/top needs to have the XML 
preamble removed, the XHTML DTD references removed, and the namespace 
declaration removed. Advice by the W3C and WHATWG has wavered over the years, 
mainly for the sake of accommodating very old versions of Internet Explorer 
that'd self-destruct seeing Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml despite 
supporting the format fine. Because XML parsing requirements are more stringent 
than for HTML, it is more specific and useful to serve polyglot documents as 
application/xhtml+xml anyway if that's what these were.

Thanks,
John

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