This is indeed a

JeevesBond — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 12:28:51 +0000

This is indeed a controversial subject, good article though. Think Megan's choice to recommend XHTML is a good one, there are some issues when it's served as the correct MIME type. If someone understands the MIME type issue, they're probably going to understand the requirements of serving as XML too.

I'm a bit annoyed with all the proponents of going back to tag soup, just because IE doesn't support XML properly!

Sorry. I did miss the bit

webwiz — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:23:47 +0000

Sorry. I did miss the bit about the xml declaration.

I also failed to thank you for a great effort in explaining this difficult and contentious subject. Well done!

David, I did mention that

Megan — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 15:30:13 +0000

David,

I did mention that about the xml declaration. Maybe you missed it. You're right about the browsers have never properly supported xhtml bit, I should have caught that.

Quote: However, the problem

webwiz — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 03:31:29 +0000

Quote: However, the problem is that browsers have never properly supported xhtml.

XHTML as XML seems to work fine here in Opera and Firefox.

Quote: One of the reasons to use a strict doctype is that you'll always get standards compliant rendering mode.

There is a bug in IE6 - If you include the XML declaration at the top of any XHTML document, or, indeed, even a comment at the top of XHTML or HTML, then IE6 switches to "quirks" mode. Fixed in IE7.

One final point; you raised the issue of character sets and encoding. Some people I know seem to think that you can make a document use Unicode by adding a "charset=utf-8" declaration on the page. Unfortunately, saying it is so does not make it so. I hope your readers will take the time to read the Tutorial: Character sets & encodings in XHTML, HTML and CSS that you thoughtfully included as a reference.