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Re: Re[2]: Unclosed list tags

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Oct 6, 2004 2:25PM

On Wed, 6 Oct 2004, Jared Smith wrote:

> > but real XHTML won't be suitable for the WWW for years (since IE
> > does not support real XHTML).
>
> Could you please explain why? IE is far from perfect, but it certainly
> seems to support XHTML to me (at least in recent IE versions).

The operative word is "seems".

If you send a document labelled (in HTTP headers) with
Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml
to IE, it will get mad - just start a "Save As" dialogue.

The only way to make IE understand XHTML at all is to mis-label
it as text/html, which means that IE will process it as HTML.
If you are cautious and apply the (in)famous appendix C of the
XHTML 1.0 specification, you might manage to fool IE into treating your
XHTML document the right way.

> It may not
> have the best support for CSS styling of XHTML content, but I don't
> see any cases where true, standards-based XHTML breaks in IE.

_Any_ true XHTML breaks it.

Besides, XHTML 1.0 gives _no_ functional improvement over HTML 4.01.
It's only when you go beyond XHTML 1.0 in the XHTML road when you find
something potentially useful. But then you can't any more fool IE
into processing it as HTML, so it goes into pieces. And this will probably
remain the situation until Longhorn is on the market, and how long will it
take before it gets even 50 % penetration worldwide?

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/