MIME Hell

As opposed to mimes in hell…which, I suspect, is quite commonplace.

Frequent readers of the Random Thought Archive (and those who simply know me) know of my extreme digital nerdiness—especially when it comes to validating my web pages. I’ve taken great care to see that every page actually works (from a technical point of view).

Imagine my horror, then, as I validated a document today, and received a warning that I was using the wrong MIME type!

I’ve run into this before—particularly as I tried to find a way to serve MathML to many browsers (including the Great Satan, IE) AND have those pages validate. Thus, I thought I was prepared…

Step one: as per W3C recommendations, change the charset parameter to "application/xhtml+xml". My non-mathml pages (plain old XHTML) were being served as text/html, which W3C says should not happen…and, apparently, they really mean it now.

D’oh! Now IE won’t read it.

Step two: add the XML header. No luck.

Step three: add some information in my HTACCESS file to make my web server send the correct MIME type when these pages are delivered. Still no luck.

Step four: change the file extension (and add more HTACCESS info). Grrrrr.

Naturally, the problem was with Internet Explorer. IE doesn’t like XHTML when it’s served properly (imagine that: a Microsoft product that doesn’t actually work…)

(Its worse than that, though…MS doesn’t see any "demand" from "the market" for XHTML support. They also don’t recognize the W3C as the Standards Gods. Come on!)

It turns out that there is a solution…roll back my declared version of XHTML to 1.0.

That’s it? I have to take a step BACK in order to make things work?

Incredible…

Page last updated 2012-03-29