Re: XHTML 2.0 -- A Chance to Improve Document Structure?

On a related note, I presume serving XHTML 1.X documents with the
"text/html" MIME type is really a transitional situation, and that with
XHTML 2.0 we should move up to "application/xhtml+xml".

However, with the exception of Amaya, all user agents I've tried it
with give an "unknown MIME type" style message[1].  So you can't expect
to open a site in an old browser and see pages degrade gracefully,
as far as the user is concerned he/she has an error message because
of a faulty web site.  (I'm sure there could be a browser-sniffing
workaround for this, but even so it would be a pain.)

Pushing XHTML 2.0 will prove very difficult indeed; developers will
want to see definite benefits before they abandon what they know.  If
they can accomplish the same with bad markup, squirting their databases
through different templates depending on user agent, they will.
Meanwhile in the real world I still have difficulty trying to convince
people that headings based solely on <font> tags are bad.  :o(

Dave

[1] Mozilla.org, to their credit, presently have it listed for inclusion
    in their 0.9.1 milestone.  Hopefully as a result it will be
    supported in Netscape 6.5 and any Mozilla-based hardware devices.

Received on Thursday, 29 March 2001 18:04:48 UTC