Internet Explorer's application/xhtml+xml support disabled?

Wikipedia claims that it exists though is merely disabled?

[JAB Creations]

Though MSIE has XML parsing capabilities (ever since version 5.0 in 1999) and can consume XHTML content as XML when identified as either ‘application/xhtml+xml’, ‘application/xml’, and ‘text/xml’, the recognition of XHTML semantics is disabled by default.

Two questions arise from this;

1.) Is this statement true?

2.) Is this statement is true how would one enable support for application/xhtml+xml in Internet Explorer?

- John

[JAB Creations]

After a bit of searching I found the following registry code will add support to Internet Explorer for the application/xhtml+xml mime...

Save as a *.reg file...

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MIME\Database\Content Type\application/xhtml+xml]
"CLSID"="{25336920-03F9-11cf-8FD0-00AA00686F13}"
"Encoding"=hex:08,00,00,00
"Extension"=".xhtml"

I confirmed this with a tool called "IEWatch" that the page was served as application/xhtml+xml.

On the downside I have not in any confirmed two things...

1.) I have not (yet) added custom XML (the point of the mime really).

2.) Internet Explorer does not break the page (like Firefox does) correctly when the page does not contain valid XML markup. I added an "r" element that was neither closed nor contained a closing "r" element.

After a lot of reading between HTML and XHTML it appears that XHTML should be quicker to process and render. That being said once application/xhtml+xml is enabled in IE (possibly version 8) it could be used in regards to marketing to show a reduction in rendering time compared to other browsers.

Now, does anyone know the registry key to enable CSS 2.1 support in IE?

- John

[Robin_reala]

That’s not unveiling some magical compatibility mode. All it’s doing is taking the text/html clsid and making a new application/xhtml+xml entry with that same key. This makes IE handle XHTML files served as application/xhtml+xml in the same way as it does XHTML files served as text/html: as broken HTML with the compatibility rules specified in Appendix C.

So no, it won’t support custom namespaces etc.; no, it won’t apply draconian error-handling.

[edited by: Robin_reala at 10:13 am (utc) on Jan. 21, 2007]