I've come a cross over Jon Duckett's book "Web Programming with HTML, XHTML and CSS", and I started to read about XHTML (which i find is curious).

When reading I see Jon encouraging to create a basic XHTML-page and then use Internet Explorer to try it out. Why? And the fact that Internet Explorer does not support XHTML is not mentioned at all in his book.

Of the big webbrowsers, only Firefox with its Gecko engine supports XHTML correctly. This is not mentioned either in the book (afaik).

In order to make Internet Explorer to display XHTML written pages (decently), you should add a MIME type of "text/html". Furthermore, the use of the text/html MIME type is now deprecated in XHTML 1.0 Strict and XHTML 1.1, in favor of application/xhtml+xml. Internet Explorer does not recognize this MIME type, so instead of rendering the page, a file download prompt is presented to the user.

And if you stick with text/html you will get a "tag soup", and Internet Explorer tries it best to unscramble it to html it knows.

Afaik these stuff are not mentioned in the book at all. Why?



"Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful" by Ian Hickson.
http://hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml

Much as I hate to I have to say that IE /does/ support a fair bit of xhtml. Firefox supports more, but its support isn't 100% complete cf:

http://www.webdevout.net/browser_sup...=on&uas=CUSTOM

That's not to say that IE is not a steaming old heap of crap!


--
Don't Stand on your head - you'll get footprints in your hair
                                           http://charlieharvey.org.uk
                                              http://charlieharvey.com

In his more recent book, Beginning HTML, XHTML, CSS, and Javascript, most of the screenshots in the book were taken with Firefox.