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Simon Willison’s Weblog

XHTML 1.1 Woes

Tim Luoma on thelist poined out this table, which details the media types that can be used when serving XHTML documents. The table shows that XHTML 1.1 should not be served with a text/html Content-Type header. Unfortunately using any of the allowed headers (application/xhtml+xml, application/xml or text/xml) will cause Netscape 4 to pop up a “download file” dialog, and is likely to cause problems in other older browsers as well. Looks like I’ll be sticking with XHTML 1.0 Strict for a good while to come. I don’t really understand the hurry to move to XHTML 1.1 exhibited by some developers—to my mind, the single biggest advantage of XHTML is the fact that it allows documents to be parsed by any XML parsing tool, and this benefit is available in XHTML 1.0.

Posted 29th July 2002 at 7:01 pm

This is XHTML 1.1 Woes by Simon Willison, posted on 29th July 2002.

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2 comments

  1. That said, should not != must not, and basically gives you free reign to send the right mime-type to the browsers who can handle it, if you want to set it up that way, or to just use text/html if you have to otherwise. I changed to using XHTML 1.1 simply because I didn't have to change anything on my site bar the doctype. That said, I hate breaking backwards compatiblity. I think text/html is staying for a while.

    Lach - 31st July 2002 09:04 - #

  2. That's interesting - so there's nothing wrong with using XHTML 1.1 and browser sniffing for NS4, then sending a text/html Content-Type header if NS4 is detected? Seems to make sense.

    Simon - 31st July 2002 10:28 - #

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