[WEB4LIB] Re: What's next after HTML?

[Thomas Dowling]

At 02:29 AM 11/20/2002, Per Åkerlund wrote:
>Thomas Dowling wrote:
> > [Using XHTML]...
> > doesn't gain you anything in terms of browser support (if you're a
> > hardliner about MIME content types, it actually loses you a
> > lot)....
>
>I'm curious of what you are losing if you're a hardliner about MIME
>content types. Could you please elaborate a bit on this?


Sorry, I didn't mean to be so cryptic.  According to 
<http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/>:

   In summary, 'application/xhtml+xml' SHOULD be used for XHTML
   Family documents, and the use of 'text/html' SHOULD be limited to
   HTML- compatible XHTML 1.0 documents. 'application/xml' and
   'text/xml' MAY also be used, but whenever appropriate,
   'application/xhtml+xml' SHOULD be used...

There's a fair bit of waffling both there and in the XHTML spec about when 
servers could send text/html for XHTML documents, but its pretty clear that 
user agents must be prepared to accept application/xhtml+xml.  The problem 
is that IE 5.x and IE 6 (at least for Windows) totally botch this.  View 
<http://www.ohiolink.edu/~tdowling/xhtml.cgi> in IE, Opera, and a Mozilla 
browser.  IE won't even try to display it, but will offer to download it 
instead.


Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu