Posted by Toby A Inkster on 02/20/07 17:09

David Dorward wrote:
> Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>
>> But the W3C makes a big noise about it! See http://www.w3.org main page
>> right now. They have created a working draft for XHTML 1.1 Second Edition.
>
> Which says that XHTML 1.1 SHOULD be served as text/html... and
> references a document which says it SHOULD NOT be served as text/html to
> support that.

The other major change is that it adds a Schema to validate your X(HT)ML
against. All XHTML 1.1 documents must continue to carry a DOCTYPE though,
and conform to the DTD.

Overall, I think I am *for* allowing XHTML 1.1 to be served as text/html,
provided it meets the compatibility guidelines in XHTML 1.0 Appendix C.

David, on your web page you write:

| Additionally, as far as I know, nothing added in XHTML 1.1 (i.e. Ruby
| annotation) is supported by legacy user agents. So there seems little
| point in allowing it to be served as text/html.

As it happens, Ruby annotation is *only* supported by Internet Explorer
5.0+ for both Windows and Macintosh -- precisely the sort of browsers that
benefit from allowing XHTML 1.1 to be served as text/html.

(With a bit of CSS trickery, you can fake Ruby support in other browsers.)

Yes, it would be nice if Internet Explorer supported XHTML properly, and
sending it as application/xhtml+xml serves as a useful stick to beat
Microsoft with, to encourage them to add proper XHTML support to their
browser.

You could argue that sending XHTML as text/html prevents you from taking
advantage of browsers' stricter parsing methods. But browser makers are
free to apply these strict parsing methods to XHTML documents served as
text/html -- there is *nothing* in any specification that even suggests
that they should not.

Allowing XHTML 1.1 to be served as text/html *finally* gives the CJK
community a standards-compliant way of serving ruby annotated text to a
user agent that supports ruby annotated text.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux

* = I'm getting there!

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