Re: Can Browsers Attempt to Render Broken XHTML?

At 09:46 AM 6/26/2003, Tim Roberts wrote:
>How can they be losing presumed accessibility benefits if the document is:
>
>Well structured, with style seperated from content.

Because you can do exactly the same thing with HTML 4.01.

>Equipped to apply any of the operations that could be applied to XML on the
>server side to accommodate alternative browsing devices.

Because the discussion is currently XHTML served as text/html which a UA 
will forgive invalid code in, not XHTML served as application/xhtml+xml?

>Possibly lighter on bandwidth if CSS/XHTML combination is used correctly.

Because you can do exactly the same thing with HTML 4.01.

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

I have observed the same with the pro-XHTML argument.  I generally find 
that if there is no specific reason to use XHTML, HTML is perfectly fine to 
use.  And that avoids the issues that crop up with the 
application/xhtml+xml mime type, or with only serving XHTML as text/html.

>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?

Bill Mason
Accessible Internet
w3c@accessibleinter.net
http://www.accessibleinter.net/

Received on Thursday, 26 June 2003 13:14:30 UTC