

Re: HTML or XHTML - why do you use it?

From: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU>
Date: Thu, 09 Jan 2003 02:53:12 -0500
Message-Id: <200301090753.CAA13211@nerd-xing.mit.edu>
To: Toby A Inkster <tobyink@goddamn.co.uk>
Cc: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, "Peter Foti (PeterF)" <PeterF@SystolicNetworks.com>, "'www-html@w3.org'" <www-html@w3.org>

> Yes, but if you read me message fully, you'd see that I suggested that
> IE/Windows is the browser *most* likely to do doctype sniffing, because of
> their history of ignoring MIME types:

IE/Windows does not do content sniffing just because it wants to violate the
http standard.  It sniffs because its developers think it provides a better
experience for their users (let's not attribute malice where there is only

Doing doctype sniffing of the sort you describe would decidedly _not_ lead to a
better experience for their users (pages would suddenly break that used to
work).  So I doubt that IE/Windows will start doing it.

I could be wrong, of course; I have no inside knowledge regarding IE/Windows.

In the first place, God made idiots; this was for
practice; then he made school boards.
                                     -- Mark Twain
Received on Thursday, 9 January 2003 02:53:20 GMT
