Re: XHTML with Internet Explorer

"Tantek Çelik" <tantek@cs.stanford.edu> wrote in message
news:BBCA3415.2F7A9%tantek@cs.stanford.edu...

>> but text/html is
>> (ridiculously) a valid mime-type for XHTML 1.0.
>
>No.  text/html is a valid mime-type for XHTML 1.0 that
>conforms to Appendix C and is then therefore interpreted
>by user agents as HTML4.

Interesting, Could you describe exactly what "Appendix C conformance" is,
for example, Should we follow Appendix C.1 which states avoid PI's or should
we follow Appendix C.14 which states include PI's.

There are numerous other problems with Appendix C. which make it entirely
inappropriate for being conformance requirements, if you're correctly
stating the opinion and intent of the WG with XHTML 1.0, then we need
responses to the outstanding issues - and XHTML 2.0 development should not
take WG priority over addressing those issues, instead we get issues
un-responded to, and others not even acknowledged.

>In fact, sending XHTML 1.0 as text/html may be better thought
>of as sending invalid HTML4 which happens to "work" (for the
>most part) when interpreted as tag soup.

Absolutely, but text/html is a valid mime-type for XHTML - RFC 2854 states
this, as does 5.1 of XHTML1 - so Internet Explorer does support XHTML 1.0.
It may be doing so in a manner that means it is unaware of XHTML 1.0, but
that's due to poor drafting of the specification which allows this.

> It certainly is not being
>treated as XHTML, not even by other useragents which
>supposedly *do* have actual support for XHTML.

Of course not, Appendix C makes this clear, that does not mean it is not
rendering it, text/html is a valid mime-type for XHTML, IE renders the
XHTML - there are almost certainly places where it does so non-conformantly,
but so do other UA's which claim XHTML support.

Jim.

Received on Sunday, 2 November 2003 07:39:37 UTC