MIME specification clarification

To whom it may concern

I have been teaching IT students learning Webpage construction to use  
templates that follow the structure shown on the W3C's own web pages.  
Namely:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">


<head>
<title>World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

We have in our labs until very recently been using IE 6 but have now  
upgraded to IE 7.

I feel I should now be altering the MIME type to be 'application/xhtml 
+xml' but I note that W3C has not done this on their pages. Is this be  
cause of backward compatibility issues with earlier browsers?

I have gone and looked at the http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/#compatGuidelines 
   "Compatibility Guidelines" for people wanting to serve XHTML as  
text/html. In here it says you :
"DO NOT include XML processing instructions NOR the XML declaration."

However, as copied above, W3C actually have their web pages starting  
with the XML declaration and serving as text/html?

I am asking because I use what the coding used on W3C pages is as  
guidance for my teaching. I find many of the recommendations very  
difficult to understand so I am wondering if I have misunderstood  
something here?

Given I am teaching TAFE (Technical and Further Ed) students units  
that ask them to develop pages to W3C standards, in today's world what  
do you think the best standard is to teach? I have been using XHTML  
1.0 Strict, and getting students to make and work off a template that  
starts with the (?xml dec, then a < ! - - comment declaring their  
authorship, then the (!DOCTYPE, then the (html root as shown above,  
then the (head, the (title and the (meta http-equiv as specified on  
your pages.

I hope someone is able to help me with a clarification on this.

Thankyou in anticipation

Regards

Sue Dowson
P.S. Thanks to every one of you folk that work on the W3C guidelines.  
I hate to think where we would be without them.

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Received on Tuesday, 10 November 2009 14:30:22 UTC