Quoth Thorsten Glaser:
There’s HTML-compatible XHTML, which you can serve as text/html,
and there’s nōn-HTML-compatible XHTML, which you must serve as
application/xhtml+xml,
yes
and if you expect to serve websites you
may serve the latter only if explicitly requested by the browser
because the browser needs to be able to handle this, and e.g.
NCSA Mosaic won’t know how to do that.
No. If the browser is unable to handle it, so be it—no XHTML
support, that’s just a feature not implemented that people might
want—but the server is /not/ non-conforming.
Handling XHTML approximately by treating it as HTML-syntax HTML
may be useful in stead of refusing to handle XHTML, but that is
not implementing XHTML.
←←← Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth Edition) (p34 of 94)
Tags for Empty Elements
[44] EmptyElemTag ::= '<' [392]Name ([393]S [394]Attribute)*
[395]S? '/>' [396][WFC: Unique Att Spec]
Empty-element tags may be used for any element which has no content,
whether or not it is declared using the keyword EMPTY. [397]For
interoperability, the empty-element tag SHOULD be used, and SHOULD only
be used, for elements which are declared EMPTY.
I.e., <asdf></asdf> and <asdf/> are equivalent. There is
a recommendation on what not to do.
In the end effect, though, who cares about standards, what you need to
care about is browser compatibility. That being said the standards do
explicitly make room for browser compatibility as outlined in the above
snippet and referenced standards.
OK, here’s a snippet from the XHTML standard for this:
Which, of course, is not the only standard standardizing XML
documents using the XHTML Media type and namespace; something
conforming to WHATWG HTML is very much valid. That drops the
compatibility guidelines. And indeed, the subject contains
“xhtml5.”
XHTML 1.0: The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Editi... (p22 of 39)
5. Compatibility Issues
This section is normative.
Although there is no requirement for XHTML 1.0 documents to be
compatible with existing user agents, in practice this is easy to
accomplish. Guidelines for creating compatible documents can be found
in [132]Appendix C.
5.1. Internet Media Type
XHTML Documents which follow the guidelines set forth in [133]Appendix
C, "HTML Compatibility Guidelines" may be labeled with the Internet
Media Type "text/html" [[134]RFC2854], as they are compatible with most
HTML browsers. Those documents, and any other document conforming to
this specification, may also be labeled with the Internet Media Type
"application/xhtml+xml" as defined in [[135]RFC3236]. For further
I.e., you need to follow the guidelines if you are XHTML and
labeled text/html.
This normatively underlines what I wrote above.
It underlines one of your statements.
Happy?
Yes: I understand your position and disagree.
Now excuse me, I’m kinda busy with $dayjob
Have a nice day.
and in no way obligated to
do your research for you.
It is not research that I could have done myself that I asked for,
but your interpretation of the standards. Thank you for doing
that despite not being obligated to do so.
