XHTML served as text/html considered harmless?

[Pete Forman]

Ian Hickson's essay at http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml and many
others argue that XHTML served as text/html should be considered
harmful.

I'm looking for any evidence that this is really so. As far as I can
see it is only difficult. Is it harmful if done correctly?
If XHTML 1.0 Strict is served as text/html with a DOCTYPE declaration
but without an XML declaration then it should be rendered in
"standards" mode by current browsers. http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/
It is assumed the the W3C HTML compatability guidelines are followed,
e.g. use <br />. http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#guidelines

Older browsers such as Netscape 4 are unlikely to lay out the pages
properly. Personally I am happy if the content is rendered legibly in
these cases.

XHTML 1.0 does not hold any great advantages over HTML 4.01 but that
is not relevant to my question.
--
Pete Forman -./\.- Disclaimer: This post is originated
WesternGeco -./\.- by myself and does not represent
pe*********@westerngeco.com -./\.- opinion of Schlumberger, Baker
http://petef.port5.com -./\.- Hughes or their divisions.

[Martin Honnen]

Pete Forman wrote:

Ian Hickson's essay at http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml and many
others argue that XHTML served as text/html should be considered
harmful.

I'm looking for any evidence that this is really so. As far as I can
see it is only difficult. Is it harmful if done correctly?

The main point is that it is very hard to do it correctly and most
people end up with doing things which only work as their documents are
parsed by the tag soup parser but break if the documents are parsed by
an XML parser e.g. wrapping script code in <!-- --> comments.
If you have the skills and patience (or the tools) to write XHTML 1.0
that is backwards compatible to HTML then you can serve it as text/html
and as application/xhtml+xml without doing harm.
But often tools know how to produce well-formed or even valid XHTML but
do not implement the backwards compatibility rules, for instance I have
seen a lot of people complain about their XSLT processor creating
totally well-formed and valid XHTML alike
<img src="whatever.gif" alt="whatever"></img>
as that is not backwards compatible. They usually blaim the XSLT
processor for not creating proper XHTML in that case.

--

Martin Honnen
http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Wed, 6 Jul 2005, Pete Forman wrote:

If XHTML 1.0 Strict is served as text/html with a DOCTYPE declaration
but without an XML declaration then it should be rendered in
"standards" mode by current browsers.

No, it needs additionally to conform to the restrictions in XHTML/1.0
Appendix C.

[Pete Forman]

"Alan J. Flavell" <fl*****@ph.gla.ac.uk> writes:

On Wed, 6 Jul 2005, Pete Forman wrote:

If XHTML 1.0 Strict is served as text/html with a DOCTYPE declaration
but without an XML declaration then it should be rendered in
"standards" mode by current browsers.

No, it needs additionally to conform to the restrictions in XHTML/1.0
Appendix C.

Apologies for my lack of clarity. That was meant to be implicit in my
post. There are also the usual issues of restricting CSS, JavaScript
and DOM to maximize portability between UAs.

Writing such XHTML is difficult. I was asking if it was totally
impractical.
--
Pete Forman -./\.- Disclaimer: This post is originated
WesternGeco -./\.- by myself and does not represent
pe*********@westerngeco.com -./\.- opinion of Schlumberger, Baker
http://petef.port5.com -./\.- Hughes or their divisions.

[Nick Kew]

Pete Forman wrote:

Writing such XHTML is difficult. I was asking if it was totally
impractical.

Not difficult - just pointless. What does it gain you, unless it
just happens to be an automatic consequence of your choice of tools?

The difficulty comes when you generate XHTML using XML tools that
don't know or care about Appendix C. In such cases you would need
to post-process with mod_xhtml to ensure what you serve is
compatible with text/html.

--
Nick Kew