RE: Is this legal XHTML 1.1?

Ok, after this post is all said and done, what are we in the business
world to do? For those who are not allowed to send dynamic content to
adjust the MIME type on the fly, what are our alternatives?
 
I personally am moving towards XHTML (at least 1.0 Transitional until I
understand all the tags fully) and so far in my testing I have not setup
a custom MIME type in my IIS server to recognize the XHTM(L) extension,
and have served it as standard text/html.  I see that it is wrong to do
this, but how are we to fully test this and provide backward
compatibility?  If the markup is correct (in terms of the Markup not the
MIME type) and you serve it as text/html, it should be able to view it
in most browsers just fine right?  And when the backward compatibility
is not as necessary, we can them switch the document to .XML or setup
the .XHTML extension on the server...  If that is something that is do
able then we have no problem.  If that is not doable, what do you
recommend?
 
Richard Norman
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU> 
Sent: Friday, December 13, 2002 4:59 PM
To: "Jelks Cabaniss" <jelks@jelks.nu>
Cc: <www-html@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Is this legal XHTML 1.1?




> You're saying, "Because of old/broken UAs, don't use XHTML on the web
as 
> text/html." 

No, _you_ are saying, "Because of old/broken UAs, I can't send XHTML as 
text/xml or application/xhtml+xml."  Ian is saying, "Because it's bad
for the 
future of the web, don't send XHTML as text/html; if you want to use
XHTML, 
send it as text/xml or application/xhtml+xml or use those vaunted XML
tools 
everyone carps about to transform it to something resembling HTML with
the same 
content." 

To which you then are responding, "I would rather just author HTML that
a 
compliant HTML UA will render differently from a tag_soup one." 

So we get back to XHTML being a vehicle for sending more and worse tag
soup out 
as text/html (the number of bugs reported on Mozilla because someone
wrote, or 
rather copied, some XHTML that doesn't even satisfy Appendix C of XHTML
1.0 and 
then served it as text/html is rapidly climbing into the hundreds; if
current 
trends continue, that will become _the_ most_reported "parser bug" we
see by 
next year....) 

Again, if you can author XHTML that works fine in all the browsers
involved and 
is valid, more power to you and this discussion is not about you. 

Boris 
__ 
Ninety_Ninety Rule of Project Schedules: 

The first ninety percent of the task takes ninety 
percent of the time, and the last ten percent takes the 
other ninety percent. 


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Received on Monday, 16 December 2002 13:42:41 UTC