The MIME type for XHTML is application/xhtml+xml. If you point Internet Explorer at an XHTML document with that MIME type, Internet Explorer will ask you if you want to download it. Why? Because Internet Explorer doesn’t recognize the MIME type! You can trick IE by using the text/html MIME type for XHTML documents, but you’re really not supposed to do that with XHTML 1.1, which is what we use here at Peiratikos. So we have to serve up our blog as XHTML 1.1 for people with good browsers (Mozilla and Opera) and HTML 4.01 for people with bad browsers (Internet Explorer). Bad Internet Explorer! IE also fucks up CSS. Support a browser that supports Web standards: download Mozilla.
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Copyright © 2003-2009 Rose Curtin and Steven Berg. Published under a Creative Commons License
Damelon Kimbrough says:
I could have gone the PHP or Apache route to serve different headers to different browsers, but I just decided it would be nice, for once, to not hack at stuff to get it to work. So while it’s true no one visiting with IE can get a page I also didn’t need to spend any time futzing with those CSS issues. Yeah, Microsoft is the biggest, and yes I eliminate 90+ percent of my ‘potential’ viewers but let’s be honest about this. Microsoft could easily support standards if playing nice was of any concern to them andsince my weblog could, under the best of circumstances, only draw a readership of maybe 20-30 people anyway, what’s all the fuss over? Yeah, 7 gagillion people can’t potentially view my site, but they weren’t going to be visiting anyway. I’ll still get my 20-30 eventually, the only difference is that none of them will be visiting it with IE.
— 22 January 2004 at 5:29 am (Permalink)