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Ian Hickson has an published an intruiging paper on the case for avoiding XHTML.

Here it is in a nutshell:

  • Browsers decide how to handle a file based on the MIME type that the server sends with it.
  • HTML Web pages are identified with a MIME type of text/html.
  • Pages written in XHTML that are sent with a MIME type of text/html don't benefit from any of the features of XHTML.
  • To benefit from the features of XHTML, pages must be sent as application/xhtml+xml.
  • The most popular Web browser (Internet Explorer 6) cannot view pages sent as application/xhtml+xml.
  • </UL>

    And all this time, I was ignorantly assuming that any well formed HTML page was XHTML. Well, you live and you learn.

    UPDATE: I forgot to link to Ian Hickson's paper http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml.

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