On 10/9/05, Kevin Ballard kevin@sb.org wrote:
From what I've heard, it's fine to server XHTML, but you really should server it as text/html rather than application/xml+xhtml. The reason is because if it's broken (i.e. non-validating), the browser still understands it as text/html but not as application/xml+xhtml. This is because Firefox and Safari (I don't know about others) uses a full-blown XML parser to read application/xml+xhtml files, but it uses a regular HTML parser to read text/html files, so any non- validating stuff will break completely as application/xml+xhtml but will work as text/html.
So basically, XHTML is perfectly fine to use. Just don't use application/xml+xhtml as your MIME type unless you're 100% sure that your page validates, because if any part of it doesn't, the entire page will be rendered unreadable as the parser says "hey this isn't valid!"
It is with the application/xml+xhtml mime type that you have the Javscript problems as well, plus with dynamic content like a blog it is a real pain to keep everything validating as no matter how hard you try you end up doing some silly mistake in a post and totally fsck'ng up your site until you realize it.
Hence why I am not currently serving as application/xml+xhtml although I did for a while using content negotation to serve it to the browsers that could support it.
Regards, -- Jason Bainbridge http://kde.org - webmaster@kde.org Personal Site - http://jasonbainbridge.com