I'm going to have to go with Lachlan on this one. IE has as much support for XHTML as it does for application/foo-bar. If I serve my application/foo-bar as text/plain, IE will display the page as plain text. If it 'looks' correct that is only a coincidence.
More importantly IE's HTML parser is not just a standard SGML parser for certain cases. Try using a DTD and specifying extra entities. HTML has been broken because people did not follow the specs. Indeed, if browsers started treating entities properly there would be an increadible amount of pages broken for missuse of &. If you want another potentially good thing gone bad from missuse you don't have to look any furthur than RSS and it's 9 (I think, but it could easily be higher) almost completely incompatible versions. And for each version there's people sending it with at least 3 different mime-types. Sometimes people escape they're encoding and sometimes they don't. It's no wonder that you'll often see <em> and such in rss headlines. Finally XHTML is XML that looks like HTML, not the other way around. I don't think it's a good idea to teach newcomers about XHTML until they have a fairly good grasp of what XML is - otherwise they'll just be doing glorified HTML with /'s at the end of empty elements. On Sat, 2005-12-03 at 09:50 -0500, Vlad Alexander wrote: > [Lachlan wrote: IE has no native support for XHTML at all.] > So it's not "native" support but there _is_ support. How can you tell > if there is support, well, you do test-cases. If one can produce a > test-case of valid XHTML served as HTML to IE and IE parses it > correctly, then there is support. Why should we care if IE use an SGML > or an XML parser to process the markup? The main thing is that markup > is parsed correctly and there is no data loss. How can IE do this > reliably? Because valid XHTML markup written to comparability > guidelines is a sub-set of HTML. > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
