Nearly three years ago I converted all the markup on this site from strict HTML 4 to strict XHTML 1. Fairly soon after this, I discovered that, to be kosher, I had serve this with the MIME format set to “application/xhtml-xml.” For a long time I ignored this, noting that I could get away with serving this as “text/html as long as I didn’t try to embed any real XML in it.
Recently though, in the process of trying to send content with the correct MIME on the site of a customer of mine, I discovered that I was dodging a lot of issues just for the sack of bogus bragging rights. Yes, it is cool that I am trying to be as futuristic as possible in my web development but, it’s pointless if I am not doing it right and if I don’t really have a reason to do so. I don’t plan to embed MathML, SVG or ChemML in any of my customer’s sites soon, so what’s the point? Here, on this site, which is hosted on two Solaris boxes in the basement of Baka’s parent’s house in Alameda, I have to do a lot of back and forth with Baka before I try anything really exotic, like play around with mod_rewrite. So in the end, the XHTML experiment may have to be called to a close.