=?utf-8?B?UmU6IFt4bWwtZGV2XSBJRTkgYW5kIGFwcGxpY2F0aW9uL3hodG1sK3htbA==?=

["=?utf-8?B?UmFuZCBNY1JhbmRlcnNvbg==?=" <therandshow@gmail.com>]

As much as I feel that xml is a better format than html, I don't see a huge reason to serve the correct mime type. The performance differences seem to be small enough that it's not worth doing browser switching for content types (even if ie9 is compliant, a lot of people use 7 and 8).

However, there are cases where correct serving to browsers is important in the practical sense. That is if you are using namespaces or if you don't want to follow html endtag rules. My understanding (correct me if I am wrong) is that xhtml that doesn't match html5 standards (ie, no namespace usage, only certain tags self-closing) must have the proper mimetype.

Of course I will admit I am far less of an expert than most on this list, so I welcome anyone pointing out errors in what I have said.

----- Reply message -----
From: "Jirka Kosek" <jirka@kosek.cz>
Date: Fri, Aug 19, 2011 4:45 pm
Subject: [xml-dev] IE9 and application/xhtml+xml
To: "Jesper Tverskov" <jesper.tverskov@gmail.com>
Cc: <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>


On 19.8.2011 9:50, Jesper Tverskov wrote:
> All major browsers today support mimetype "application/xhtml+xml":
> IE9+, Safari, Firefox, Opera, Chrome. They all render XML webpages
> incrementally. Very nice.
> 
> They all, except IE9, show an error message if there is a well-formedness error.
> 
> But IE9 switches to HTML parsing instead of showing an error message!

No, IE9 stops processing and renders content before the first error.

> Question. IE9's behavior is in my opinion in opposition to what the
> spec demands. 

AFAIK no specification ever prohibited web-browser from trying to fix
broken XHTML by using different more lenient parser.

> I find it confusing but could
> it be the way forward to get "application/xhtml+xml" more widely
> adopted?

Maybe, but realistically what is advantage of serving web page as
application/xhtml+xml instead of text/html? Try to forget to XML bias
which most of xml-dev subscribers probably have. ;-)

				Jirka

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