[longisland6]

just wondering, what percentage of sites do you think are built using web standards? you know, using the proper doctype (or any doctype at all), using css, no tables, separating content from presentation? i have a feeling it's not as many as i would like... any reliable stats?

[Agricola]

Not that many. Just do a random search of websites, even the so called professional designers know squat about valid code. It is important to have valid code, for starters your code will be easier to debug and less prone to displaying the content inaccurately Browsers are very forgiving of even horrendously abused, buggy and structured html, but future technologies may required more strict and disciplined coding. Those of us who do know how to programme in higher level languages and likes of PHP will understand how even 1 character out of place will result in total failure, whos to say that software or devices in future will act in same when accessing the XHTML. Actully this will happen now with FireFox if you serve XHTML to it in the correct manner.

Although you can produce perfect XHTML code, it is quite pointless unless you actually declare it as its proper MIME as application/xhtml-xml. Most people simply don’t understand MIME types and simply stick text/html to everything. If you declare your XHTML as text/html then anything that will access your XHTML code that can understand XHTML will assume it is html and read it as such, which of course will be stupid, as XHTML syntax is different to HTML and you carefully constructed XHTML will be read as HTML tag soup and can even render in a buggy way which will leave you stumped as to why that dammed code isn’t working as it should.

The Mozilla Foundation take this seriously and firefox can interpret XHTML perfectly and processes it as pure XHTML etc even to the point that if you have just one error in your code, like missing a slash to end a single tag like < img / > it will show a XML debugging screen in the browser. However Microsoft refuse to do anything about letting their browser to understand application/xhtml-xml, so you have to serve that up as text and just let it render it as tag soup.

This poses a problem, declare DOCUMENT TypE – application-xhtml in your header and IE which doesn’t understand it will just throw a fit and refuse to accept a single line of code there after. We can get around this by using a server side code such as php to detect whatever is accessing the file can understand application/xhtml, so if that is the case declare that, if its likes of IE, then send it as text/html, the W3 test validator doesn’t or didn’t send any information to server about what it can understand, so you have to put something in to check if it is.

What’s the point most people ask, well if you are selling yourself as being W3 compliant etc then you MUST make sure you do the job properly for obvious reasons, another factor to consider is future technologies may not be so forgiving , this new device or software could just be reliant on XML and XHTML will be looking to see if a webpage is declared as application/xhtml-xml, if it isn’t it wont bother with it.

[freelancr]

Good post, but I think the point about MIME types isn't as accurate as I have been lead to believe, and it wasn't really what the original poster asked.

Sure, using a load of messy code with no doctype will throw browsers into quirks mode leaving you with a right headache if you want to sort out bugs. But I don't think serving XHTML as text/html encounters the same problems. Infact serving XHTML as xhtml-xml puts IE into quirks mode, as the <?xml> declaration makes it think there is no doctype.

You are right though, technically it should be served as xhtml-xml, have the <?xml> tag. But thinking about this for a moment, if you did do that, and your website was a forum, or people could post comments, then it wouldn't take very much for someone to make those pages fall over totally. So is there any point?

[longisland6]

serving xhtml as the correct mime type is only one element of my question, but an important one. after a while in the industry you can quickly see if a site even has a "sense" of design. some people have it, some don't. it's not only that, but when i do a view source i want to see, ideally, xhtml strict with the correct mime type served (and not xhtml transitional that was auto inserted by dreamweaver), divs, h tags, form elements..all that good web standards design stuff... you know. so...any reliable stats on this stuff?