MSIE7 will not support application/xhtml+xml
Monday, 26. September 2005, 09:26:19
Several years passed since application/xhtml+xml MIME type was registered but on real web you will hardly find XHTML documents served with proper MIME type. The reason is simple — browser side support.
MSIE6 does not recognize application/xhtml+xml documents at all and as Cris Wilson (MSIE developer) recently wrote upcoming MSIE7 will not support application/xhtml+xml MIME type either. Microsoft with its fifty thousands employees has no resources
to update XML parser. Neither Mozilla foundation with its six billions potential developers managed to implement XHTML decently — Gecko based browsers can't render X(HT)ML documents incrementally and users have to wait before page fully loads. Opera too had problems with XHTML. Until version 7.5 it did not execute JavaScript when page was served as application/xhtml+xml, so Opera 8 is probably first version that handles application/xhtml+xml properly. It is unclear when MSIE and Mozilla will follow Opera and finally make XHTML usable. Until then HTML tagsoup will prosper.
MSIE6 does not recognize application/xhtml+xml documents at all and as Cris Wilson (MSIE developer) recently wrote upcoming MSIE7 will not support application/xhtml+xml MIME type either. Microsoft with its fifty thousands employees has no resources
to update XML parser. Neither Mozilla foundation with its six billions potential developers managed to implement XHTML decently — Gecko based browsers can't render X(HT)ML documents incrementally and users have to wait before page fully loads. Opera too had problems with XHTML. Until version 7.5 it did not execute JavaScript when page was served as application/xhtml+xml, so Opera 8 is probably first version that handles application/xhtml+xml properly. It is unclear when MSIE and Mozilla will follow Opera and finally make XHTML usable. Until then HTML tagsoup will prosper.
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