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

[hadley wickham]

> > [...]
> > If it's an xml file, doesn't that already imply the the content-
> > type is xml?
>
> This is circular logic ;)

I agree :) How can you have a content-type specification instruction
which tells the processor what content-type this document is?  ie.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/pdf;
charset=utf-8"/> doesn't make any sense.

> Also, we want to further specialize the type, i.e. it could be xhtml
> +xml (as in this case) or it could be rss+xml, that is what we need
> to specify.

Does rss+xml have a <meta> tag?

> > 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.
>
> I don't fully follow this. But the meta tag is not a hack, it is a
> way to specify the content type (and encoding, etc.) when the page is
> NOT sent over http, i.e. when it is loaded from a non-http server
> (like your disk drive). The meta tag never overrides the info sent by
> the server, on the contrary, it is the server which overrides the
> meta tag.

see above, and links in the other email I sent.  I'm not sure that
this is the full story.

> > There's a good discussion of xhtml here: http://www.hixie.ch/
> > advocacy/xhtml.  I think this sums it up: [...]
>
> Sure, XHTML is not useful on the net, etc. -- but what we are
> discussing here is how a correct XHTML 1.1 template should look,
> regardless of what the real-life treatment of XHTML for content sent
> over http is.

Fair enough.

Hadley