Posted by Toby A Inkster on 05/02/07 08:54

cwdjrxyz wrote:

> Even if the code is completely valid html at the W3C validator, the
> page on the web that someone views is not xhtml unless it is served as
> application/xhtml+xml or application/xml, or very rarely another xhtml
> mime type.

XHTML *should* be served as application/xhtml+xml but *may* be served as
application/xml, text/xml or text/html.

An oft-quoted W3C note says that XHTML 1.1 *should not* (note: not "must
not") be served as text/html, but the current draft of the XHTML 1.1
Second Edition recommendation does explicitly allow for XHTML 1.1 to be
served as text/html.

Of course, served as text/html, browsers will generally treat XHTML as
if it were HTML with a few extra slashes in some places, and won't process
it according to XML rules. Of course, they *could* process it as XHTML,
but browser makers tend to decide not to, as it may result in cryptic error
messages, which aren't generally very useful for the browser user.

Whether or not browsers *treat* it as XML, doesn't effect its intrinsic
XML-ness.

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

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