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

[Henri Sivonen]

On Mar 7, 2007, at 21:04, Elliotte Harold wrote:

> There's just no one obvious way to fix all the broken markup that's  
> out there. TagSoup picks one approach. HTML 5 picks another. Both  
> will surprise people a lot of the time. At the parser level that  
> can't be helped.

Actually, it can. The HTML5 spec allows non-browser apps to halt on a  
parse error. If you opt to make your HTML5 parser halt and catch fire  
on the first parse error, you have achieve a similar level of parser- 
level predictability as you could achieve by using an XML parser.

> However at the document level it can be helped. When the document  
> author takes the care to generate a well-formed document, they are  
> rarely surprised by the resulting tree the parser builds.

This is true for error-free HTML5 as well except for optional tags.

> Does the HTML 5 fixup algorithm ever change the *tree* for a well- 
> formed (but invalid) document?

Yes.

> By contrast with a real XML parser, I can tell you what's going to  
> happen without cracking open the spec.

Only because you are familiar with the XML spec.

> HTML5, TagSoup, and XML parse trees are all deterministic and thus  
> predictable; but only the XML tree is *obvious*.

HTML5 with halting at first error is just about as obvious as XML.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/