Re: [minutes] XHTML and MIME types

A lot of mobile sites have adopted XHTML Basic, the transitional DTD or 
even tag-soup HTML (no DTD) as their markup of choice (off the top of my 
head http://bmw.mobi, http://mobile.alitalia.com/ and http://metro.mobi/ ).

I argue that a lot of those 800 "not-anambiguosly mobile" sites are 
actually OK for mobile users.

Would it be possible to get hold of those 800 urls so that we can take a 
proper look?

Luca


Eduardo Casais wrote:
> This discussion is quickly heating up, so let me provide 
> some more information about the statistics.
>
> 1) The MAMA project intended to analyze the desktop
> Web primarily, but mobile sites got visited as well.
>
> DOCTYPES (% of doctypes)
> XHTML basic:              56 (0,0031%)
> XHTML mobile profile:  50 (0,0028%)
> HTML compact:             4 (0,0002%)
> WML:                          43 (0,0024%)
>
> MIME types (% of URL)
> text/vnd.wap.wml:                  57 (0,0016%)
> text/x-hdml:                             1 (0,000028%)
> application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml: 1 (0,000028%)
>
> >From the percentages, I surmise that there was no effort
> to visit mobile sites consciously and that whatever mobile
> content got analyzed was by happenstance.
>
> 2) The MIME type application/xhtml+xml with high
> probability overwhelmingly identifies XHTML (desktop)
> content, not XHTML basic nor mobile profile.
>
> In effect, application/xhtml+xml represents 935 URL. 
> Unambiguously mobile XHTML doctypes represent 106
> URL. 1 URL is unambiguously of XHTML mp type. Overall,
> this means that, in the data set, probably 830 URL (i.e.
> 88,77% of the XHTML MIME type) correspond to XHTML
> desktop. 
>
> It might be that some MIME types correspond to 
> documents without a doctype, but these could be anything
> (including XHTML desktop), although they are very
> probably traditional HTML.
>
> 3) XHTML (in all its guises) represents a small, although
> already statistically significant fraction of the WWW. 
>
> As in my previous message, XHTML (all variants) amounts
> to 31,83% of unambiguously identifiable document types,
> which themselves represent 50,96% of all URL. In the end,
> this means that XHTML represents at least 16,22% of the
> content on the Web (at least, since some of the URL 
> without doctype just might be XHTML markup 
> nevertheless). This is not overwhelming, but significant
> (almost 1 URL out of 6).
>
> 4) The discussion occurs at the margins of significance. 
> Let us remember that 99,91% of _all_ content -- whether
> HTML, XHTML or _anything else_ -- is advertised as 
> text/html! 
>
> The MIME type text/html has thus become a generic
> identifier for "browsable Internet content" -- lay the blame
> on IE and Microsoft's disregard for standards on this one.
>
>
> E.Casais
>
>
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Received on Thursday, 8 January 2009 11:16:28 UTC