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XHTML

The XML conformance tag issue was fixed in Internet Explorer 7 beta 2. The remaining
issues were fixed in Internet Explorer 9.
What was that download prompt all about? Or didn't you see it? Try it in IE ;)
Well. There are several versions of HTML. As more and more features were added, the
version number increased. It got more and more bloated and the syntax became messier.
So Strict HTML was made. This kept the useful features, and removed the features that were
not needed, such as where two HTML tags do the same job, or have been replaced by a
much better CSS style. Several lazy habits were still allowed, such as omitting closing tags,
and using shorthand attribute values. In addition, all HTML browsers had decided to allow
the author to make mistakes that were not defined by the specification, and would try to sort
through the jumble to convert it into something usable. This made the browsers much more
complicated than they should need to be, and it meant that XML features could not be
reliably used. So XHTML was made. The messy syntax was no longer allowed, and only the
purest, cleanest HTML is allowed. That makes XHTML the most easy of all HTML to
interpret.
There is more to it than that, since XHTML understands namespaces, so you can embed
content using different XML-based markup languages into the same document (XML,
MathML, SVG, RDF, etc.), without risking conflicts. That is one of the most important uses
for XHTML. But that is not important right now, since I am not making use of any of that here,
this is just plain XHTML.
All I did was tell the browser that I was using XHTML, and that if it wanted, it could use the
more efficient XML parser, to save it having to look for mistakes and trying to work out what I
meant for it to do. There are no mistakes. Don't believe me? Check this page for pure
XHTML syntax. What does IE do? It doesn't actually understand XHTML. Sure, it can look at
XHTML pages, it uses the HTML parser, and pretends that the page is full of mistakes. As
soon as I tell it that there are no mistakes, it panics, and asks you if you want to download it
instead (presumably so that you can then open it in a decent browser).
As a separate but related issue, if you include the XML conformance tag in an XHTML
document (yes, you are supposed to include this tag for most encodings), IE 6- will ignore
the doctype tag, and will refuse to recognise strict mode. In fact, this incorrect document type
detection is the reason that the shadowed page effect does not work, because only in strict
mode does IE 6 recognise that HTML and BODY are separate tags that can be styled
independently. Try it here to see what I mean (yes, I do know that IE might cut off the floating
content when you do that then hover over a link). IE 8 beta 1 fails for completely unrelated
reasons.
Another important point about this is that if sent correctly, JavaScript and CSS behave
differently. document.write and innerHTML should be replaced by DOM methods, IDs and
classes become case sensitive, the body element behaves more like a DIV element, and
unless properly escaped, scripts and styles using traditional comments will be ignored. Being

unable to treat XHTML correctly, IE does not do this, meaning that we get an inconsistent
responce, often with authors blaming the wrong browsers.

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