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Note:These pages make extensive use of the latest XHTML and CSS Standards. They ought to look great in any standards-compliant modern browser. Unfortunately, they will probably look horrible in older browsers, like Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Moreover, many posts use MathML, which is, currently only supported in Mozilla. My best suggestion (and you will thank me when surfing an ever-increasing number of sites on the web which have been crafted to use the new standards) is to upgrade to the latest version of your browser. If that's not possible, consider moving to the Standards-compliant and open-source Mozilla browser.

April 20, 2003

The Lone Man

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Honestly, this stuff is not as hard as it looks!

But, on one point, I have to disagree

Note that Distler’s site comes awfully close to failing the MIME-type test. Distler is serving up his pages as application/xhtml+xml to all browsers that support it (such as Mozilla) and text/html to browsers that don’t, such as Internet Explorer. According to the specification, XHTML 1.0 documents “MAY” under certain circumstances be served up as text/html, but XHTML 1.1 documents “SHOULD NOT”. To wit: “In particular, ‘text/html’ is NOT suitable for XHTML Family document types that adds elements and attributes from foreign namespaces, such as XHTML+MathML.” But we’ll give him a pass on this one.

That’s just wrong. Graceful degradation (together with a warning label that MathML posts won’t render correctly in inferior browsers) is the correct behaviour. Having this blog not render at all in Internet Explorer (or Opera or Camino or Safari or …) is incorrect behaviour, whatever the “Standards” may happen to say.

Posted by distler at April 20, 2003 10:37 PM

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1 Comment & 1 Trackback

Re: The Lone Man

How about – laughing on the outside and crying on the inside? That’s my plan.

Just for the record, I’m aware of the unfortunate tendency of most browsers to choke when XHTML is served up with the proper MIME-type. I’ve added a note to that effect at the end of my original post. Furthermore, I think that your method of handling this issue is the only non-suicidal way to follow the standard. That’s exactly how I would do it, if I were using XHTML.

Posted by: Evan Goer on April 21, 2003 1:48 PM | Permalink | Reply to this
Read the post Research says that shows with X in the name get higher ratings.
Weblog: xiven.com - weblog
Excerpt: subject them to various validation tests (which essentially tested the XHTML validity and that the page is being sent with the correct MIME-type). Shocked I was to find that xiven.com was not mentioned in the list of fully XHTML compliant websites (wh...
Tracked: May 6, 2003 5:34 PM

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