Re: Mimetype: application/xhtml+xml -- add to validator?

On 29.05.01 at 10:39, William F. Hammond <hammond@csc.albany.edu> wrote:

>Terje Bless <link@tss.no> writes:
>
>>At the moment, XHTML does not exist as far as MIME is concerned, except
>>insofar as it conforms to the backwards compatibility guidelines; in
>>which case it should be labelled as "text/html" and validate as such.
>               ^^^^^^
>
>Let's be clear that in the XHTML 1.0 recommendation
>            http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xhtml1-20000126
>the verb is "may", and indeed it must be "may" if the referenced
>Appendix C (containing guidelines for authors) is informative rather
>than normative).

See, this is why the IETF capitalizes MAY/SHOULD/MUST when used as
normative imperatives (my god, did I just write that? ;D). That wasn't any
standard or reccomendation or Word Of God saying "should"; it was just
little old me. :-)

The point was: the only MIME type mentioned for XHTML is "text/html" and
then only in the case where you have a document conforming to the backwards
compatibility guidelines. Such documents are bastard hybrids in any case.
What I'm worried about is that there is no way to specify an actual honest
to gosh XHTML document that _doesn't_ try to be tag-soup conformant. I
don't want to _guess_ what it is; if you can fit the rigour of XML rules,
you can damn well get the MIME type right. Except of course, you can't
because there isn't a "right" MIME type yet...

Received on Monday, 4 June 2001 20:31:07 UTC