Re: Is this legal XHTML 1.1?

Richard Norman:

> 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?

The obvious alternative is HTML 4.01 served as "text/html". That has the 
widest support of all alternatives.

> I personally am moving towards XHTML (at least 1.0 Transitional until
> I understand all the tags fully)

If you can do the media type dance correctly XHTML 1.0 (written in HTML 
compatibility mode) served as "text/html" is as far out as you can go. 
And then HTML 4.01 is just as good, unless you have some particular 
reason and some particularily great need to write in XHTML style.

> 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,

If you serve XHTML 1.0 in compatibility mode it's not wrong (at least 
it's allowed).

> 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?

That would work in all browsers except some extremely obscure browsers 
that actually work fully according to the SGML rules. From a practical 
point of view you can ignore those browsers. Their use base in not even 
measurable.

> 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?

Stick to old trustable HTML 4.01.

-- 
Bertilo Wennergren <bertilow@gmx.net> <http://www.bertilow.com>

Received on Monday, 16 December 2002 14:29:31 UTC