Also, here's something that xmonad.org really ought to do too: don't serve filename extensions! http://xmonad.org/contrib.html should be http://xmonad.org/contrib , and the link on the front page should go to that... because what if we decide to change the content-type?-- and what do users care what type it is in their minds and bookmarks?-- there is nothing inherently html about the file, and it makes it harder to use another file extension like xhtml to tell Apache that it's xhtml. For Apache, I put in the top of my website http://isaac.cedarswampstudios.org/ a .htaccess with: Options MultiViews DirectoryIndex index Jeremy Shaw wrote:
Most of the other "problems" with xhtml are more like common pitfalls for document writers who don't understand the differences between html and xhtml and don't test their documents thoroughly.
Right. I believe my main argument is really comes down to:
"Why use XHTML if you aren't really going to use it?"
It is my understanding that if you are not setting the HTTP Header, Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml, then absolutely nothing you put *in* the document will cause the browser to use the XHTML engine instead of the HTML engine.
Obviously if you serve XHTML you use Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml !--(well, at least you've argued effectively that serving something with DOCTYPE XHTML but Content-Type html is stupid.) I do it with my website, XHTML 1.0 Strict, application/xhtml+xml, in UTF-8. HTML syntax is confusing, since I know XML, and it's easy to catch my mistakes with a validator, and IIRC its default charset isn't UTF?. I don't care about IE, I just tell my friends to use Firefox... although it seems alright to use hacks to serve it as text/html to IE if necessary, because IE is broken anyway (IIRC its Accept: is rather implausible anyway). Also, even if HTML5 is the future, it sounds there is "XHTML5" to go with it so I can keep writing non-confusing web pages. There is not only one future. (Also, at the time I started it, it was less obvious that "XHTML > HTML" was a mostly dead idea.) As for the issue of putting non-well-formed XML content into your webpages because it's automatically generated: that's a bad idea! If your tools are broken enough that they don't always generate well-formed XML (let alone valid!), or if you want to allow your users to serve broken content, it needn't break your page -- there are tags for that very purpose, such as <object>. For example, since http://irrepressible.info/'s javascript for your site uses document.write() and IIRC doesn't conform to Strict, I put it in another file that's HTML 4.01 Transitional and include it using (I hope your e-mail client doesn't interpret this as HTML, because it's plain text in this email!!!: <object data="irrepressible.html" type="text/html" width="180" height="150"><a href="http://irrepressible.info/">irrepressible</a></object> ) Perhaps, ideally a web-server would say so if you were trying to serve invalid content, instead of serving that content (unless an explicit override perhaps). P.S. wow, my pages under http://isaac.cedarswampstudios.org/muse/ are beautiful (to my eye) -- I had forgotten how much work I had done tuning the formatting and color! -Isaac