Re: Mimetype: application/xhtml+xml -- add to validator?

[ CCed from here to hell and back. :-) ]

On 26.05.01 at 00:42, Alexander J. Vincent <ajvincent@hotmail.com> wrote:

>I was trying to run a quick check to see if a testpage I'd written would
>validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.  The server (bugzilla.mozilla.org) had
>the testpage as application/xhtml+xml.  The validator reported it could
>not do anything with that mimetype.
>
>Would you please add this mimetype to your list of mimetypes?  :)

   As of February 2001, the HTML WG has taken no official position on
   what MIME media type should be used to describe XHTML 1.0 or any
   other XHTML based language, except in the case where XHTML 1.0
   documents satisfy certain additional requirements (see [XHTML1]
   section 5.1) and can be described with "text/html" (see [TEXTHTML]).

   This document only registers a new MIME media type,
   'application/xhtml+xml'.  It does not define anything more than is
   required to perform this registration.  The HTML WG expects to
   publish further documentation on this subject, including but not
   limited to, information about rules for which documents should and
   should not be described with this new media type, and further
   information about recognizing XHTML documents.

At the moment, XHTML does not exist as far as MIME is concerned, except
insofar as it conforms to the backwards compatibility guidelines; in which
case it should be labelled as "text/html" and validate as such.

No, this is not a good state of affairs.

Yes, I wish the HTML WG would get their collective backsides in gear and
get this mess sorted out once and for all.


For the time beeing, the Validator can't support application/xhtml+xml
because it has no defined semantics and any we assume would be fairly sure
to be incompatible with what the HTML WG finally decides on. Since what you
are writing is XHTML in bugwards compatible mode, just label it as
text/html for now. Hopefully, by the time you are ready to move up to the
current version this MIME type mess has been sorted out.

Received on Tuesday, 29 May 2001 01:27:49 UTC