Re: XHTML and MIME

On Friday 2006-09-01 09:53 +1000, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> L. David Baron wrote:
> >The HTML working group answered question #3 in [2] (answer: no),
> >although it was unanswered in the original XHTML1 recommendation.  I
> >think this was a mistake (although I didn't feel as strongly about it at
> >the time).
> 
> Do you mean it was a mistake that the WG said no to content sniffing or 
> a mistake that it wasn't stated in XHTML 1.0?

I mean it was a mistake that the WG said no to content sniffing.  (I
would have preferred to do it based on the presence of the XML
declaration, "<?xml ... ?>".)

In particular, content sniffing would have allowed migration to XHTML
without waiting for the vast majority of browsers to support it.

I'm also unhappy about the other steps that the HTML working group has
taken to reduce ease of migration to XHTML:  for example, by insisting
that other specifications that have special rules for HTML (such as
CSS's rules for handling backgrounds on the body element) make them not
apply to XHTML.

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                <URL: http://dbaron.org/ >
           Technical Lead, Layout & CSS, Mozilla Corporation