Perishable Press

1 • January 27, 2008 at 2:48 pm — Louis says:

That’s courageous to go with XHTML 1.1, but as it’s very close to XML, you have to serve it with the proper content-type. A quick look in Firebug shows that your are serving this page in text/html.

I’m sure you are the kind of person who only refers to W3C texts — and I agree that it’s the more trustable way — so I give you this link as a reference :

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/xhtml-media-types.html#summary

Also, I see that you are using the xml declaration at the very top of your source code. Once again, very brave, as IE goes quirks mode then. Though, the page I’ve linked previously explains that :

Therefore, while it is STRONGLY RECOMMENDED to specify an explicit charset parameter through a higher-level protocol, authors SHOULD include the XML declaration (e.g. ). Note that a meta http-equiv statement will not be recognized by XML processors, and authors SHOULD NOT include such a statement in an XHTML document served as ‘application/xml’ (and ‘application/xhtml+xml’ as well for that matter).

I hope I started a reflexion on the relevance of going XHTML 1.1. I mean, 1.1 is so close to XML, that you may just want to wait for XML democratization.

3 • January 27, 2008 at 10:14 pm — Louis says:

I understand, but it makes me feel like you want to “do it right”, and that you do too much. If you do not serve XML, what is the point of starting with a xml declaration ?

W3C recommands two behaviors :

serving XHTML 1.0 strict as text/html content, to ensure that your pages are read by IE browsers;
serving XHTML 1.1 as application/xml content — wich break if there is any mistake in the code (break = blank page) — to come closer to XML, and be “because of its advancement of the web-standards paradigm: complete separation of structure, behavior, and presentation.” ;)

My point is that, as you want to serve content for iE, you should use XHTML 1.0 strict, with no xml declaration, and in html/text.

5 • February 23, 2008 at 11:49 am — Themis says:

I’m using XHTML 1.1 and with a little influence of an outside language like PHP you can serve IE its content.

Perhaps is not really a fix, its more less of a workaround.
But our friend IE may someday… be compatible with the world instead of being compatible with their own rules.

More information can be found at this website: http://juicystudio.com/article/content-negotiation.php

7 • July 12, 2008 at 9:57 am — aljuk says:

Louis says “(if) you want to serve content for iE, you should use XHTML 1.0 strict, with no xml declaration, and in html/text.”

Of course you could do that, and many do, but I’d suggest 1.1 without the xml declaration is actually closer to the spirit of web standards. Then, one day, when IE is either fixed or dead, just add in the xml declaration to the headers of your sites, and voila. In the meantime, serving up as text/html will have no drawbacks, and you have the added benefit of having the ruby elements at your fingertips. People get way too obsessed about serving XHTML 1.1 as application/xml - the web isn’t ready for that yet, but that’s no excuse not to move forward where you can.