I didn't realize this until yesterday: all your painstakingly crafted XHTML web pages, well-formed, and validated against the DTD, are served by the typical web server as "text/html".

As such, the browser will treat them just as good old HTML. All the close tags that you inserted, all the quotes around attributes, and the silly <br /> tags, are treated as superfluous or quirks.

I learned this on a public debate at Norman Walsh's Weblog.

And he served the a subsequent blog as application/xhtml+xml, the correct MIME type for XHTML pages.

And guess what? It rendered perfectly in Mozilla.

I remember in the early days of XML, pundits often say, "If you have an XML browser, you can do blah blah blah." Now that we all have XML browsers, where are the XML web sites?

Do you dare to serve your website as XML?

Responses[3]

Posted by Weiqi Gao on January 20, 2004 11:20:47 PM CST #