Re: Some IE7 issues: BOM and www.w3.org

> By the way, there's another embarrassment for someone, possibly
> not unrelated:  it seems that IE7 (with or without MathPlayer)
> fails to display http://www.w3.org/  At least that's what I
> discovered. I cannot explain this one either.

I can now, partially. When I uninstalled MathPlayer I did not think to
clear IE's disk cache.  So after unistallation IE was still displaying
the old cached page (which was incorrect) and not the new one.  So
the problem is in MathPlayer2.1beta which (at my suggestion, I
shamefully add) alters the content negotiation to look for and
accept application/xhtml+xml. This works fine for pages that
MathPlayer alters, but when it doesn't and passes the document
straight through as XHTML, the browser fails to display it properly.

I am back at the point I was last year when I saw no easy resolution to
the problem of serving web pages with MathML to both Firefox and IE
as well as the many web-search bots simultaneously. Possible solutions
are

1. Wait for IE to support XHTML (this will take too long)
2. Configure the web server to send different pages according to
   the user-agent (this is morally very wrong, and 99% of authors
   do not have this control over their web server anyway)
3. Abandon any hope that search engines should index ones pages
   properly
4. Redesign content negotiation and/or mime types so that
   XHTML+MathML can be identified as a specific documtn type
   to be requested/served (out of my control, and in any case there
   are too many potential XHTML+Something formats to have a mimetype
   for each)
5. Author pages for one browser only and receive massive amounts of
   flak from readers using some other browser.  (Been there, done
   that .. believe me the flak *is* massive.  Don't forget these
   readers have no technical knowledge, and cannot follow the simplest
   instructions on installing of configuring software, and completely
   deny the existence of any problem at their end.)

Very fed-up...

Richard

Received on Saturday, 20 January 2007 10:12:13 UTC