- From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2007 11:13:42 -0500
Anne van Kesteren wrote: > Personally I'd just give everyone HTML unless they specifically ask for > XML and even then those tools should be capable of handling HTML imo. > After all, it's the exchange format of the web. Personally I'm happy just sending XHTML as text/html and letting the browsers and other tools do what they like with it. I don't hold to the belief that the MIME type is holy writ from GOD that clients must not modify for their convenience under penalty of hellfire and damnation. Nonetheless, some people do seem to believe that so this article offers them a reasonable alternative. If one were conspiratorially minded, one might begin to wonder whether any reasonable alternative will be accepted, or if a lot of the arguments and claims are really designed merely to eliminate XHTML from consideration by making it too inconvenient for practical development. The insistence on sending XHTML as application/xhtml+xml is pretty pedantic, and without a lot of practical benefit. It's strange to see such a picky point being made by the same people who aren't all that interested in the much more useful standard of well-formedness. It's also strange that these are the same folks who are bending over backwards to maintain compatibility with older browsers in every area except this one little HTTP header field. Indeed, if one were of a suspicious turn of mind, one might think the insistence on sending XHTML as application/xhtml+xml were nothing but a strategy to make XHTML so practically inconvenient that no one would consider it. But I don't have such a suspicious mind, so I'm sure it's all honest disagreement. :-) -- ?Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo at metalab.unc.edu Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published! http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/
Received on Wednesday, 7 March 2007 08:13:42 UTC