Posted by John Salerno on 02/05/06 04:16

What exactly does this mean:

"Document sent as text/html are handled as tag soup [1] by most UAs.
This means that authors are not checking for validity, and thus
most XHTML documents on the web now are invalid. Therefore the main
advantage of using XHTML, that it has to be valid, is lost of the
document is then sent as text/html."

To me it sounds like he is saying that *any* document written in XHTML
and then served as text/html is invalid. But is that really the case? Or
is he saying that the document *could* be invalid because it could still
be prone to the methods of HTML (e.g., no closing tags, etc.)?

I assume if you validate your XHTML, then simply serving it as text/html
doesn't harm it, right? It doesn't suddenly make it "invalid," does it?
(Perhaps in a strict sense it does, because it's not truly XHTML, but as
far as the actually words in the document themselves, they are still
valid, right? And if it was then served as application/xhtml-xml, it
would be valid, correct?)

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