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

[Elliotte Harold]

Alexey Feldgendler wrote:

> 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).


Neither is really my point. The problem with malformed HTML is that it 
has an inconsistent DOM. You get different DOMs in different browsers 
and tools. Making a document well-formed XHTML gives you a consistent, 
reproducible, predictable DOM.

If you go one step further and make the document valid strict XHTML, the 
DOM gets even simpler and cleaner. Many nodes are pruned from the tree. 
This makes it easier still to manage.

It's not about whether we can represent a DOM in HTML or not. It's about 
consistency and simplicity.

I'm not the first to point this out by any means, but I don't think it's 
been as widely recognized as it should. I suspect that's because many 
developers working with HTML aren't really using the DOM at all. They're 
hacking the text with IDs, document.write, innerHTML, and other tricks 
that don't really pay attention to the tree structure of the document 
they're working on. That may be a chicken-and-egg problem: as long as 
the document is malformed even figuring out what the tree is is nearly 
impossible and not cross-browser.

With HTML 5 parsers (which we don't have yet) the DOM of malformed 
documents may yet become predictable, but it won't ever be obvious. And 
it may well not be consistent across browsers unless Microsoft jumps on 
board. By contrast, valid strict XHTML (probably transitional too) has a 
reasonably consistent tree structure in all browsers today.

Once you achieve well-formedness you can begin looking at the document 
in  a new way. You get access to powerful tools like XPath and XSLT that 
you didn't have before. You can start doing more than merely tossing the 
page at a browser for rendering. And you don't have to wait for an HTML 
5 parser to do it either. You can do it today with a large tool chain.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo at metalab.unc.edu
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
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