[whatwg] Re: OT: (X)HTML and design of site

[Malcolm Rowe]

Franck Quélain writes:
>> [...] The browser that currently has the
>> largest market share by far does not support XHTML.

> XHTML work perfectly with all browsers (Internet Explorer included).
> The problem just come from the support of the content-type
> application/xhtml+xml send in the HTTP Header.
> Internet Explorer don't support it.

I'll stand by my original statement: Internet Explorer does not 'support' 
XHTML, given any meaningful definition of 'support'. It's true that you can 
send XHTML to IE marking it as text/html, but that only 'works' because IE 
interprets it as HTML, and IE's parser is lax enough that it ignores some of 
the markup (and to be fair, this is true of the majority of the real-world 
HTML UAs). 

> W3C recommandation is to use application/xhtml+xml for serving XHTML 1.0
> but you can use text/html if you want. the obligation of serving XHTML
> with application/xml+xhtml appeared only in the 1.1 version of XHTML.

You can only use text/html if your document conforms to XHTML Appendix C. In 
any case, even if it does conform to App C, why don't you just send the UA a 
valid HTML document, rather than sending something that's probably not 
strictly valid HTML? 

> So actually you can use XHTML instead of HTML and it works very well for
> all my websites.

Are they actually valid XHTML though? How do you know? 

> Remember that XHTML is just an XMLization of HTML.

So why send XML to a client that can only deal with HTML? 

Regards,
Malcolm