Re: Can Browsers Attempt to Render Broken XHTML?

On Wednesday, June 25, 2003, at 11:36 PM, Masayasu Ishikawa wrote:
> The point is the media type.  If you want your document to be
> processed as XHTML by user agents, send it as XHTML, i.e. with
> the media type 'application/xhtml+xml'.  XHTML user agents that
> support the 'application/xhtml+xml' media type, including Amaya,
> Camino, DocZilla, Mozilla, Netscape 6/7, Opera 6/7, Safari, and
> X-Smiles, will not recover from a fatal error and won't render
> your XHTML document if it's not well-formed.  The only non-conformant
> browsers that somehow recognize the 'application/xhtml+xml' media
> type and yet render the document despite well-formedness error are
> iCab (at least up to v2.9.1) and w3m (at least up to v0.4.1), as
> far as I'm aware of.
>
> If you send your document as 'text/html', you are effectively
> telling that "process it as HTML", and the user agent handling
> of an invalid document is undefined.

Thanks for this explanation!

Okay, so if someone is writing XHTML but sending it as text/html,
then they're not really sending XHTML and likely are losing any
presumed accessibility benefits of XHTML?

--Kynn

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Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                     http://kynn.com
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Received on Thursday, 26 June 2003 11:37:16 UTC