Re: Can Browsers Attempt to Render Broken XHTML?

How can they be losing presumed accessibility benefits if the document is:

Well structured, with style seperated from content.
Equipped to apply any of the operations that could be applied to XML on the
server side to accommodate alternative browsing devices.
Possibly lighter on bandwidth if CSS/XHTML combination is used correctly.

It seems like occasionally this discussion is veering towards an anti-XHTML
stance just for the sake of it.

On Thu, 26 Jun 2003 08:42:43 -0700, Kynn Bartlett wrote
> 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
> 
> --
> Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                     http://kynn.com
> Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain                http://idyllmtn.com
> Author, CSS in 24 Hours                       http://cssin24hours.com
> Inland Anti-Empire Blog                      http://blog.kynn.com/iae
> Shock & Awe Blog                           http://blog.kynn.com/shock



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Received on Thursday, 26 June 2003 12:52:19 UTC