[TxMt] Misguided use of content-type in XHTML/1.1 template

[hadley wickham]

On 3/5/07, hadley wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/4/07, Allan Odgaard <throw-away-1 at macromates.com> wrote:
> > On 5. Mar 2007, at 01:00, porneL wrote:
> >
> > > I've just noticed that template for XHTML/1.1 has been changed to
> > > include application/xhtml+xml content type in <meta> element.
> > >
> > > This is completly misguided as <meta> is there only for backwards-
> > > compatibility non-XHTML user-agents -- that is only those which *do
> > > not* support application/xhtml+xml.
> > >
> > > From W3C XHTML FAQ:
> > > "Note that a meta http-equiv statement will not be recognized by
> > > XML processors, and authors SHOULD NOT include such a statement in
> > > an XHTML document served as 'application/xml' (and 'application/
> > > xhtml+xml' as well for that matter)."
> >
> > The reason it says SHOULD NOT (which means "not recommended", see RFC
> > 2119) is that for an XML document, you declare the content type using
> > processing instructions. Though I have no idea how the "content type"
> > processing instruction looks, anyone?
>
> If it's an xml file, doesn't that already imply the the content-type
> is xml?  Isn't the content only important when you're sending things
> "over the wire" so the program at the other end can recognise what to
> do?  The meta tag is just a hack for html to give the page author some
> way of overriding the content-type that the server is sending.

See also:

http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1144794177&count=1
http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1154950069&count=1

which support what I meant to say: browsers use complicated heuristics
to determine the actual content-type of a page - and the http
content-type and html meta tag are often ignored.

Hadley