Dave Shea mentioned yesterday that he is on his way to becoming a member of the X-Philes, a short list of designers with sites that pass two validation tests and serve their pages with the correct MIME type to browsers that can handle it. When we first heard about Evan Goer's XHTML 100, as he calls it, we were satisfied passing two of the three tests, fully aware we failed to serve our sites with the proper MIME Type. We were even glib about it:
Though we use XHTML 1.0, we serve our documents with a mime type of "text/html," not "application/xhtml+xml." This bothers some people. It doesn't bother us.
Well, it bothers us, now.
We're now using an Apache mod_rewrite rule -- lifted from Mark Pilgrim's excellent XML.com article on this subject -- to serve our XHTML documents as 'application/xhtml+xml' to browsers that support it (Mozilla) and 'text/html' to those that don't (everything else). A few notes:
We're now closer to the spirit and letter of the XHTML standard (relevant text). Besides simply serving our documents as 'application/xhtml+xml,' we've removed our http-equiv statements. From the W3C:
Note that a meta http-equiv statement will not be recognized by XML processors, and authors SHOULD NOT include such a statement in an XHTML document served as 'application/xml' (and 'application/xhtml+xml' as well for that matter).
As far as we can tell, we now qualify as an X-Phile.
Also: In January of this year we developed a valid XHTML 1.1 document as a resource to others, but never linked to it. Here it is (only works in Mozilla): Valid XHTML 1.1 Document.