in reply to OT: How do you serve up XHTML?

Re...
...the apparent attitude of w3.org (excerpts from the link above):

    Which browsers accept the media type application/xhtml+xml?
    ... In fact, any modern browser. ...

    Does Microsoft Internet Explorer accept the media type application/xhtml+xml?
    No. ...

Have I misunderstood something here? To my reading those statements could be considered contradictory.

The comments, above, from Joost and samtregar may be sufficiently illuminating, but to be very explicit, the "powers that be" at w3c do indeed appear to have an "attitude" (and, IMHO, one that's largely justified) about M$' longstanding practice of releasing browsers (among other products) that don't comply with existing standards whether by failing to implement some of those or by trying to sell the public on the notion that its proprietary extensions/modifications of a standard represent the "one true standard."

A cursory review of the literature (appropo the standards compliance of IE or appropo "cross browser (in)compatibilities) will show that the two statements you cite are not actually contradictory, but actually, reinforce one another, given the w3c view that IE 5 and 6 fail to even approach its definition of a "modern" browser.

As to what I serve, it's almost always HTML 4.01 (strict or transitional), unless there is some exceptionally good reason to use capabilities of XHTML. Most of my clients are NOT using their websites in ways where XHTML clearly offers net*1 advantages

*1 No pun intended; please read the phrase as having an economic tilt.

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Re^2: OT: How do you serve up XHTML?
by Cap'n Steve (Friar) on Sep 17, 2007 at 03:01 UTC
    While it's true Microsoft has a bad record when it comes to playing nicely with others, W3C has a history of useless standards. If not for proprietary extensions, I think innovation on the web would be long dead.
[reply]

      W3C annoys me by creating standards that no UA will ever, ever, implement. Sometimes they are impractical, sometimes they try to make xhtml/css duplicate functionality of a better solution.

      IE vexes me not so much because of proprietary extensions or standards breaking, but because what they decide to break isn't intuitive to me. Things I expect to work fail; Things I expect to fail somehow work.

      All in all, though, I think we've got it better in this generation than we have before. Some of these issues are still a pain to deal with, but I recall it often took herculean effort to make even minor functionality work in all the UAs out there.

[reply]

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