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Posted by John Salerno on 02/05/06 04:24
John Salerno wrote:
> What exactly does this mean:
>
> "Document sent as text/html are handled as tag soup [1] by most UAs.
> This means that authors are not checking for validity, and thus
> most XHTML documents on the web now are invalid. Therefore the main
> advantage of using XHTML, that it has to be valid, is lost of the
> document is then sent as text/html."
>
> To me it sounds like he is saying that *any* document written in XHTML
> and then served as text/html is invalid. But is that really the case? Or
> is he saying that the document *could* be invalid because it could still
> be prone to the methods of HTML (e.g., no closing tags, etc.)?
>
> I assume if you validate your XHTML, then simply serving it as text/html
> doesn't harm it, right? It doesn't suddenly make it "invalid," does it?
> (Perhaps in a strict sense it does, because it's not truly XHTML, but as
> far as the actually words in the document themselves, they are still
> valid, right? And if it was then served as application/xhtml-xml, it
> would be valid, correct?)
Here's a related quote:
"If you ever switch your documents that claim to be XHTML from
text/html to application/xhtml+xml, then you will in all likelyhood
end up with a considerable number of XML errors, meaning your
content won't be readable by users. (See above: most of these
documents do not validate.)"
To me, this argument seems valid only because it carries the
presupposition that most authors are still writing as if they are using
HTML instead of XHTML. If you actually know what you are doing (i.e.,
know how an XML language needs to be structured) and you do that, then
this point is moot.
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