intertwingly

Anne van Kesteren: I hope we can all agree that sending XHTML as application/xhtml+xml is silly

Ah, the sweet smell of flamebait.

It’s funny.  I first read Anne’s post on Planet Intertwingly, where it was XHTML served as application/xhtml+xml to my browser (Firefox).  Whether or not it is valid XHTML is debatable (in fact, it is not), but what is not debatable is that it was well formed XML.

If you like, we can debate whether or not The WHATWG Blog’s feed should include relative URI’s.

But another thing that is not debatable is that with modern browsers, you won’t see any of Jacques Distler's silly MathML formulas, or any of my silly SVG icons unless we serve our content as application/xhtml+xml.

I will also note that the same reasons that text/xml should be deprecated apply equally well to text/html.

But here is something we can agree on: the requirement that pages must be well formed XHTML is too high of a barrier for adoption for technologies such as MathML and SVG.