Posted by Michael Winter on 12/18/30 11:37

On 16/01/2006 03:10, cwdjrxyz wrote:

> Michael Winter wrote:
>
>> On 13/01/2006 21:43, cwdjrxyz wrote:
>>
>> [Around 6KB of needlessly quoted text]
>>
>> Please learn how to post; trim quotes.
>
> I quite well know how to trim quotes [...]

Then please be kind enough to do it in future.

> Since the poster asked a variety of questions that I thought might be
> best covered by an example [...]

Your posted was related to only the first question.

[snipped pointless drivel about bandwidth]

This is Usenet, not the Web. It is a simple courtesy to keep bandwidth
usage to a minimum and follow the preferred posting style of the group.

[snip]

> "Bad example" is a value judgement taken alone, and is meaningless in a
> technical example without technical specifics.

I have no problem mentioning the in-line CSS declarations, the absolute
positioning, the pixel dimensions (and font size), the useless and
inaccurate META element, and the generally poor markup (the worst of
which is that block of text to the right). However, that wasn't the
point of your example, so I just hinted at the presence of other issues.

> Your follow up technical specific concerns the mime2.php file. It is
> doing exactly what I want it to do - namely serve
> application/xhtml+xml to any browser that claims it will accept it at
> all.

As both David and I have said, that isn't what it does at all.

> Some claim they would rather have html, but I want to bypass that
> when at all possible.

Stop wanting that, then.

> [...] bugs, such as the CSS background-color bug for Mozilla family
> browsers [...]

The BODY element is rendered just like any other block-level element,
and only extends to surround content that is in normal flow. As such,
the background colour will not be rendered across the entire viewport.
The HTML element is the document root, and setting a background colour
there will cause it to be rendered as you'd prefer.

> I suspect the fact that many browsers respond that they will accept
> application/xhtml+xml, but prefer html, is just to protect the
> browser vendors from complaints caused by a few bugs that can turn up
> at this early stage.

Mozilla only states that it prefers XHTML so that resources that would
negotiate between, say, HTML and XHTML with MathML, would choose the
latter[1]. Opera ranks XHTML and HTML the same. I don't know off-hand
what Konqueror's and Safari's Accept header contains.

Irrespective of their reported preferences, all of these browsers do,
for some reason or another, prefer HTML. Mozilla cannot incrementally
render XHTML. Opera 7.x wouldn't execute scripts in XHTML documents.
Previous Konqueror versions, as I recall, didn't parse XHTML as XML.

[snip]

> And of course CSS will not work on all browsers, but now only a tiny
> percentage of very old browsers.

With a properly marked-up document, it won't matter that much if CSS is
not supported (or disabled); the document will be unstyled, but still
readable and in a logical order.

[snip]

> The point of the large comment is to complain that IE is out of step
> with most other modern browsers and W3C standards.

And how exactly does that help the user (especially as they won't read
it, anyway)?

> My little comment may not help much, but if enough people complain
> about Microsoft's lack of support of application/xhtml+xml [...]

Microsoft should be left to implement XHTML properly in their own time.
Rushing their efforts will do far more harm than good.

[snip]

Mike


[1] <http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/faq.html#accept>

--
Michael Winter
Prefix subject with [News] before replying by e-mail.

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