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

[Alexey Feldgendler]

On Wed, 07 Mar 2007 15:12:06 +0100, Elliotte Harold <elharo at metalab.unc.edu> 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 you are going to write XHTML documents whose DOM is not representable in HTML, then your documents won't be compatible with MSIE, and you won't need the described MIME type trick.

OTOH, if you are going to restrict yourself to XHTML documents whose DOM is representable in HTML, then you might as well use HTML. It has been said many times here that virtually every single advantage that XHTML has over HTML4 is now also inherent to HTML5 (predictable DOM, processing with XSLT, etc).


-- 
Alexey Feldgendler <alexey at feldgendler.ru>
[ICQ: 115226275] http://feldgendler.livejournal.com