<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><BR><DIV><DIV>On Mar 10, 2007, at 11:03 PM, Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:</DIV><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">It is idealistic because, say, if you will put following in your .htaccess: <DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">AddType foo/bar .html </DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>If I "AddType application/xhtml+xml .html" to a .htaccess file, it causes browsers to interpret my html as XHTML. Browsers might ignore unknown types, but, at least with HTML, serving it with a different type DOES make a different. If I add a no-cache or expires header via the PHP header(), the browser caches the file differently. It might be idealistic to throw an unknown header and expect it to work, but if it is a header the browser knows, it will behave differently. IE is willing to add some Super-Standards Mode based on some new switch. So, they will recognize the header.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Think about this: All UAs will correctly present file</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">some.png even it contains jpeg bits. Even if server reports image/x-png content-type for it. </DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">It is very old tradition in software design - all file formats contain identification of the</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">content type in some form - usually first 256 bytes</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">is enough to determine type. So why html should be an exception of this rule?</DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>UAs sniff headers. WHATWG's HTML 5 is trying to kill off the DTD, which would be a good thing to sniff on, as I specified in the blog I posted about this very subject.[1] What the WHATWG gives us is only a way to say "This is HTML" not "This is HTML 5" or "This is HTML 6." So, sniffing isn't possible as far as I can tell. That is why it is an exception. </DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Furthermore, if we follow the spec, we will be fine for all things HTML 5 wants. The DOCTYPE is new and unique. For HTML 6, if we need to tell the browser something else, we can't. There is no versioning.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>This thread is about telling IE to turn on super standards mode. (I combined some stuff that has been on my mind instead of starting a new thread. As a newbie to this mailing list, I didn't want to over-step my bounds early on. It's ended up with more confusion.) IE's rendering modes have nothing to do with the HTML document itself, and everything to do with telling the browser how to handle the document. It's not the responsibility of the recommendation to tell the browser what mode it needs to render in. It's not in the W3C recommendation to use the DOCTYPE as a quirksmode switch in HTML 4. It was something that the browser vendors decided to do. As I said before, I think it's a cop out for the IE team to ask for a new switch. They should be creative and figure it out themselves. My suggestion was for them to do something non-invasive to the HTML 5 recommendation (look for a particular header) that would work even if W3C's recommendation is radically different from the WHATWG's. It will be more universal, won't bloat the specs, will work better for what the IE team expects (something in addition to the doctype) and can be modified to whatever Microsoft decides it wants to be since it will be proprietary to their browser.</DIV></DIV><BR><DIV> <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><DIV>----------------------------------------------------------</DIV><DIV>Robert <<A href="http://robertdot.org">http://robertdot.org</A>></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"></SPAN></SPAN> </DIV>[1] <A href="http://robertdot.org/2007/03/08/html-5-whatwg-versus-w3c.html">http://robertdot.org/2007/03/08/html-5-whatwg-versus-w3c.html</A><BR></BODY></HTML>