Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Or at least they’re dropping support for it in ASP.Net 2.0. Is this a bad thing? The initial reaction might be one of shock and indignation, that it is a step backwards. Another response might be to accept that it’s a realistic decision to make and one that actually helps support standards. The W3C suggests that XHTML 1.1 should be served with the application/xhtml+xml MIME type, something that Internet Explorer does not currently support. Judging by this announcement, I would infer that IE7 will not support it either (but am happy to be proven wrong). If ASP.NET 2.0 shipped with the ability to output XHTML 1.1, it would have to serve up a mime type of text/html for it to be supported by Internet Explorer, and that would go completely against the W3C’s way of thinking .

So what does this mean? It appears to this observer that the Microsoft team responsible for the authoring tools are acknowledging their own web browser’s shortcomings and dealing with it in a sensible way – no point pumping out XHTML1.1 on the basis that it’s "the future" while the world’s most prevalent browser chokes on it. I’m keeping my fingers crossed on IE7 getting that fix still, though!

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