Post Archive
› November 18, 2004
HTML mess
Due to the harddrive that held my Windows partition (among other things) dying a loud, screeching, horrible death I wont post the nice XHTML and accessibility post I had prepared for some time. Instead, I'll give you two questions, school-book style:
What does, according to you, the 'text/html' media type signify and imply? How do user agents and specs differ in what they interpret it to mean?
What is the reason for these SGML heaven - Tag Soup - XHTML documents, which all are valid and hold the same structure, to have such radically different treatment?
Comments
1. November 18, 2004 10:34 AM
2. November 18, 2004 10:45 AM
Hayo Posted…
xhtml with text/html signifies it's not xml. bit of a paradox. Battles were already fought.
#2: Well, because they aren't done according to spec?
3. November 18, 2004 01:20 PM
Mathieu 'P01' HENRI Posted…
#1 means that the document in its whole does not need to be a valid XML document. That is that short attributes are usable ( e.g.: selected="selected" can be replaced by selected ), and some closing tags are not necessary.
#2 A little bird told that's because the browsers do NOT support SGML. ;)
4. November 18, 2004 04:33 PM
XHTML Posted…
XHTML stands for Extensible Hypertext Markup Language and is a reformulation of HTML 4.0 in XML 1.0.
For that matter, do we really need a separate media type for it? Why would text/html not suit the purpose? IMO it should be perfectly valid.
5. November 19, 2004 03:49 AM
Curcan Ovidiu Posted…
XHTML cannot be read by human beings. That's why they decided on an application/* media type ;)
6. November 19, 2004 06:06 AM
Ben de Groot Posted…
The text/html media-type implies that you are sending the browser an HTML document, and it will consquently treat it as such. Slapping an XHTML doctype on top of this is basically a lie, it will switch the browser into tag-soup mode anyway.
Charl van Niekerk Posted…
Sorry, I forgot to do my homework. Please don't make me stand in front of the class...
Just kidding. :-)