DrDoc - 6:38 pm on Apr 2, 2006 (gmt 0)

One thing that I have a really hard time understanding is why people say that it is ok to use XHTML with a text/html mime type. Sending XHTML with text/html forces it to be parsed as HTML 4 ... thus losing any advantages XHTML had in the first place. So, if you want your code to be parsed as HTML 4, why not just use the HTML 4.01 doctype, as it will accomplish just that, but without any of the drawbacks!

To go back to the SHORTTAG minimization in HTML 4 ... Saying that "it's ok to send XHTML as HTML 4.01" simply because no browsers have implemented shorttag minimization is dangerous. You are now relying on a browser bug to get your documents to render correctly. I, for one, hope that the Gecko engine will fix this problem and implement shorttag minimization properly, in order to be more fully HTML 4 compliant.

Finally, on to a very important point... We all know by now that XHTML served as text/html is truly "HTML 4.01 in quirksmode". Unfortunately, when using the W3 validator to validate a document (with XHTML doctype specified) it should truly force a doctype override. Thus, if you have specified XHTML Strict, the validator should validate against HTML 4.01 Strict when the document is sent as text/html as this is what browsers will treat it as anyway. Further, as XHTML documents sent as text/html are not really XHTML to begin with, all the XHTML requirements (such as wellformedness, closing all tags [including empty ones like "<br />"]) are no longer in effect, wherefore you can safely write plain ol' HTML 4.01 compliant markup, throw in the XHTML doctype ... as long as you serve the document as text/html. If that doesn't sound messed up, I don't know what does.

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