Posted by John Salerno on 01/25/06 07:14

Mark Parnell wrote:
> 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.
>

Is this something you add yourself, or something the server does? I've
never seen this step in any of the "how to" stuff I've read on XHTML.

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