"application / xhtml + xml", why bother?
Nobody in their right mind really cares whether their web page is ‘text/html’ or ‘application/xhtml+xml’. And why should they? I mean my pages look the damn same either way. The heavens don’t open up and God himself doesn’t bestow me with something along the lines of eternal life when I set my web page mime types to ‘application/xhtml+xml’.
A sports car would be nice though.
Anyway, we have had four years of relative web browser peace to figure out what hell standards are about and what kind of magic we could conjure up with them. Microsoft’s ‘Internet Explorer’ announcement has all the standards boffins in the starting blocks ready to jump in headfirst. Meanwhile I’m still explaining to colleagues for the umpteenth time what ‘quirksmode’ is. “I need to close empty tags?” “What’s an empty tag?” Yes, that’s my life.
What if, and this is of course wild speculation on my part, the whole browser thing lights up again? What if XHTML 2.0 comes a knocking? Well at the rate that web standards are being adopted these days we won’t be able to answer the door because we’ll be vegging out in front of the television watching reruns of Jerry Springer.
What if web servers wise up and start dishing out ‘application/xhtml+xml’ for xhtml documents? Most of us will be well and truly screwed, so web server software won’t go down that road for a long time yet. Even though some argue that writing in xhtml today will allow switching from ‘text/html’ to ‘application/xhtml+xml’ more easily tomorrow. That in the end is a mute point because clients are never going to pay for such a conversion because nearly all of us will need to amend and correct our current work to allow the page to render as ‘application/xhtml+xml’.
The fact that we still need to use text/html hasn’t helped us to create good documents. It still allows us to be sloppy. Supporting ‘application/xhtml+xml’ could force developers in certain cases to think and act more carefully on the xHTML they output. This will never happen, because the learning curve for most of us is to high and the benefits to few. The merits of document conformance are when storing and archiving information for the long term. However most documents are tossed after a few years, so most of us wont need to lose any sleep over document mime types. But if you expect your content to be rendered into a website ten years from now you’d better get your xHTML right. Who knows, maybe by then we will have XHTML 2.