Re: Standards mode and Quirks mode (was Re: [CSS21] Test Suite)

On Jul 24, 2004, at 01:17, Chris Lilley wrote:

> [1] (HTML 4 transitional) Triggers Quirks mode for Netscape

That's not a real problem, because authors of new documents are 
expected to use an HTML 4.01 doctype.

> In practice therefore to get best compatibility you need to author in
> XHTML, have a perl script or something that cuts out the xml
> declaration and ensures the string <html or <title is in the first 256
> bytes and generally produces something that will not trip up IE,
> send the processed stuff as text/html to Win/IE and send the authored
> stuff as application/xhtml+xml for everyone else.

If you want the best compatibility, I'd suggest serving HTML 4.01 as 
text/html. Certainly, serving application/xhtml+xml to Lynx and Google 
does not lead to the best compatibility. Also, if you serve text/html 
to IE and application/xhtml+xml to others, you deprive Mozilla and 
Safari users of incremental display.

(Yes, Google does not support application/xhtml+xml as demonstrated by 
this query: 
http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Alite+site%3Amacsanomat.fi)

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

Received on Sunday, 25 July 2004 06:20:28 UTC