Posted by Mark Parnell on 01/25/06 06:36

Deciding to do something for the good of humanity, John Salerno
<johnjsal@NOSPAMgmail.com> declared in alt.html:

> I have to admit I don't know what it means to "serve" a document as a
> certain type. I assume this is something you put as an attribute in the
> head tag, or a meta tag?

No, it's an HTTP header that the server sends with the file.

> But is it necessary?

Absolutely. Any file served from a web server will come along with a
header that states the mime type. For HTML documents, this is text/html.
For true XHTML, it is application/xml+xhtml. Problem is, IE doesn't
accept files served as application/xml+xhtml. But by serving an XHTML
file as text/html, you are telling the browser it is actually an HTML
file, and so it will be parsed as HTML rather than XHTML.

--
Mark Parnell
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