[whatwg] Configure Apache to send the right MIME type for XHTML

[Elliotte Harold]

Alexey Feldgendler wrote:

> Interesting, but not of much use. If an author really wants to support MSIE, she needs to not only ensure that MSIE tries to render the document at all by setting its MIME type to text/html, but also to not use anything XHTML-specific that isn't possible in HTML, e.g. <p> inside <li>, or inline SVG. And if one isn't going to use these features anyway, there is no reason to prefer XHTML over HTML other than following the fashion.

Documents on the web aren't just about browsers, and certainly not just 
about IE. There are many interesting things you can do with XHTML 
documents you can't do with non-well-formed HTML documents. Personally 
I'm most enamored of using XSLT to process them. However, the biggest 
benefit for most developers is likely to be the simpler, cleaner, more 
reliable DOM you get with a well-formed document. If you can go to valid 
strict XHTML, the benefits get even larger.

If your primary experience with HTML is displaying it in a browser, this 
may not be apparent; but for those of us who have to write code to 
process this stuff well-formedness and simplicity are major advantages.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo at metalab.unc.edu
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