Comments on: application/xhtml+xml

By: Dominique Hazael-Massieux

Dominique Hazael-Massieux — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 12:53:20 +0000

I have detailed at the URI below how to work around broken browsers and still serve your xhtml as application/xhtml+xml for the good ones in Apache: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2002Dec/0005.html

Hope this helps

By: Jor

Jor — Sat, 19 Oct 2002 00:04:04 +0000

Actually, disregard the above about a working Proxomitron filter. It is far too unreliable at the moment to work everywhere :(

By: Jor

Jor — Fri, 18 Oct 2002 20:37:31 +0000

Just in case you are also a Proxomitron user, I have completed a filter which will attempt to fix this MSIE bug.

More details are at http://members.outpost10f.com/~jor/prox/msie.html

Of course the real solution is for Microsoft to finally fix their browser...

Interestingly enough, I have just converted parts of my personal home page to compliant XHTML 1.1 (including the content-type), and I'm seeing a very strange MSIe behaviour: it appears to be trying to interpret the doctype using my stylesheet!

By: Jan!

Jan! — Sat, 12 Oct 2002 18:50:02 +0000

Here's how I do it in one line straight in PHP. Can be done in other languages, too, of course:

$contentType = empty($SERVER['HTTPACCEPT']) ? 'text/html' : (pregmatch('#\b(application/xhtml\+xml|application/xml|text/xml|text/html)\b#', $SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT'], $matches) ? $matches[1] : 'text/html');

Read: if there is an "Accept:" header AND there is a match for either one of the things between (), set it to the match; otherwise, default it to text/html

Then it's just a matter of passing the Content-Type header on to the client (OK, that makes for a second line):

header("Content-Type: $contentType; charset=utf-8");

PS: Tim, how about adding the "pre" tag to the allowed list?

By: TjL

TjL — Thu, 10 Oct 2002 19:25:20 +0000

The disadvantage is that text/html will not show any parsing errors, so if you have an opening tag without a closing one, the browser doesn't say anything.

If you use application/xhtml+xml then the browser will stop and report errors.

It's sort of like instant validation of a sort.

Checkout the link for the poorly formed XHTML 1.1 document in Opera or Mozilla and see what it says.

By: Tridus

Tridus — Thu, 10 Oct 2002 19:00:01 +0000

Can you explain what the specific disadvantage to using text/html is? The big advantage is obviously that it works properly in IE. What do I gain by using application/xhtml+xml?

(what can I say, I don't understand basically everything on the W3C site)

By: Jor

Jor — Thu, 10 Oct 2002 17:51:46 +0000

Very nice find! This is extremely useful, as I am learning XHTML.

As for why IE displays the content as source: IE only pays respect to the file extension, and it ignores the MIME Type. If you serve foo.html as text/xml or application/xml, MSIE usally will display it as a normal webpage.