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

[Ian Hickson]

On Sun, 11 Mar 2007, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> * L. David Baron wrote:
> >My dismissal of XHTML is that the designers of XHTML and related
> >standards are repeatedly introducing more and more incompatibility
> >between XHTML and HTML, which makes it progressively harder for
> >authors to transition to XHTML (particularly to do so gradually on a
> >large site).
> 
> Out of curiosity, do you dismiss "HTML5" on the same grounds? As an
> example, http://www.bjoernsworld.de/suchmaschinen/robots-txt.html is
> as close as it comes to a proper HTML document, but to turn it into
> a HTML5 document I would need to make many non-trivial changes, e.g.
> find replacements for
> 
>   * <link rev>

We removed rev="" because it was only used correctly for one thing 
(rev=made) and was misused a _lot_, and the number of people using 
rel=author was comparable (I forget the exact numbers).

>   * <a name>

This was removed purely to simplify the language.

>   * empty <a> elements

Those are legal now.

>   * <hr size>
>   * <img align>
>   * <table align>
>   * <table width>
>   * <td align>

Those should all be removed anyway to improve your content/style 
separation, which would aid with maintenance. (I'm assuming here that 
you'd want to transition the document only if it was a document in active 
development, in which case maintenance is relevant. If maintenance is not 
relevant, there's no reason to transition the document.)

>   * review whether I use any so-called predefined classes and if,
>     whether I use them correctly, or find out how to replace them

These are gone now.

>   * review whether I am MicroformatsOK according to the latest
>     Wiki pages

HTML5 doesn't require this any more than HTML4 now.

>   * review whether my img elements are really some piece of text
>     with some alternate graphical representation

This you should do anyway for accessibility reasons.

>   * review whether my images are all the exact size given in the
>     height and width attributes

This you should do anyway to obtain quality results.

> and so on, whereas switching to XHTML would simply be a matter of 
> running HTML Tidy on all the files and lowercasing the selectors in the 
> style sheets? It's a lot of work if I just want to add my favourite 
> "HTML5" feature to the page.

Well, that's what you get for using a "Transitional" markup language 
without intending to transition. :-)

Note that moving to XHTML 1.1 would require many of the same changes, 
since it also omits the Transitional features.

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'