[MacPorts] #14062: Website does not render properly in IE7

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Dec 20, 2008, at 00:06, William Siegrist wrote:

> On Dec 19, 2008, at 9:46 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
>> On Dec 19, 2008, at 09:32, Marco Battistella wrote:
>>
>>> http://www.macports.com repose is correct, when "application/xhtml 
>>> +xml" is accepted the header response is  application/xhtml+xml  
>>> and when it is not the header response is text/html
>>> for some reason when requesting http://www.macports.com/ports.php  
>>> the response is always application/xhtml+xml
>>>
>>> I re-adapted a small php script i had written some time ago to  
>>> allow to test the pages behavior with or without the Accept:  
>>> application/xhtml+xml header.
>>>
>>> The little script works from the command line like this:
>>> $ php testGet.php -uri http://www.macports.org -accept ie7
>>> or
>>> $ php testGet.php -uri http://www.macports.org -accept safari
>>> or
>>> $ php testGet.php -uri http://www.macports.org/ports.php -accept ie7
>>>
>>> you get the point.
>>> It is a "works in my machine" type of script but i don't see why  
>>> it should not work in yours as well ;-)
>>> It will return the header and then the content.
>>>
>>> I am part of this thread because i had originally sent a  
>>> modification suggestion for this issue, i'm not a macports  
>>> developer or a macports website maintainer but I could have a  
>>> look at the code if you guys think it would help.
>>> If so what path should i use to do a checkout with subversion  
>>> (without downloading the whole macport project, just the relevant  
>>> part of the site, please)....
>>
>> You can get the web site code here:
>>
>> http://trac.macports.org/browser/trunk/www
>>
>> I haven't yet understood why I seem to be getting different  
>> behavior out of the different pages (and even different behavior  
>> of http://www.macports.org/ vs. http://www.macports.org/ 
>> index.php ) when they're all including the same common code to  
>> handle the headers.
>
> Getting consistent rendering with XHTML 1.1 is probably not worth  
> the effort. I doubt the site does anything requiring XHTML 1.1  
> anyway, so why not just serve an HTML 4.01 page? There's a good  
> WebKit blog post [1] about this issue too.
>
> -Bill
>
> [1]  http://webkit.org/blog/68/understanding-html-xml-and-xhtml/

That article, written in September 2006, basically says forget XHTML  
and use HTML 4. Is that still the best advice today, over 2 years  
later? If so, I am given to wonder why we have the XHTML standard in  
the first place, if browser vendors recommend not using it.