obscure problem using elementtree to make xhtml website

[Nobody]

On Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:21:54 +0200, Stefan Behnel wrote:

>>>> Not a bug in IE (this time), which is correctly parsing the file as html.
>>> ... which is obviously not the correct thing to do when it's XHTML.
>> 
>> It isn't though; it's HTML with a XHTML DOCTYPE
> 
> Not the page I look at (i.e. the link provided by the OP). It clearly has
> an XHTML namespace, so it's X(HT)ML, not HTML.

It depends upon your User-Agent header.

By default, it returns a Content-Type of application/xhtml+xml, so it
should be parsed as XML, i.e. <script /> should be treated as
<script></script>.

But if the User-Agent header indicates MSIE, it returns a Content-Type of
text/html, which should be parsed as HTML, where <script /> won't work.

XHTML can be either HTML or XML, and it makes a difference as to whether
you parse it as HTML or XML. If you want to create a document which parses
the same way in either case, you must adhere to the compatibility
rules in Appendix C of the XHTML standard, which means (amongst other
things) not minimising tags which can have content (i.e. not EMPTY),
regardless of whether or not they do have content.