Mark Gilbert’s Blog

I actually had a good day today at work. We had a good laugh, got lots of work done, and since I had LOADS of coffee that just made it great. I made up little songs for lots of things, and just generally went a bit mad. I tried to see how long I could keep someone’s attention by just holding a piece of plastic and saying nothing to them at all. As it turns out quite a while, sadly I forgot to time this experiment, but next time I will.

On other topics I think I’m just about done twiddling with my blog design. Hopefully it looks better, I tend to think it does and I’m rather chuffed with it all. My only complaint would have to be that I’m having a job getting it to validate as XHTML 1.1. XHTML 1.0 transitional is fine and works very well however XHTML 1.1 fails. It comes down to the democracy plugin which I use to do my voting on the right hand side. Simply put the whole thing needs to be enclosed in a div tag, but I really cant be bothered to alter the plugin. I know I’m just being lazy, but oh well, I’m not that bothered about XHTML 1.1 code.

Going back to what I was saying about Internet Explorer, I did finally get a setup that serves the MIME type as application/xhtml+xml for most browsers and text/html for IE. However that created a small problem. Currently when viewing a single post, such as this one the background of the page didn’t go all the way to the bottom of the page, smaller posts left huge white spaces that got smaller as the post got past one page of screen depth. After one page of screen depth a small white space was left at the bottom of the page after the background ends. But one smaller posts the white space was huge. It is a odd problem, and I know the issue lies with the code used for the royale theme which I didn’t write. Again it comes back to laziness, I can’t be bothered to look at the code beyond a cursory glance and so I’ll leave my MIME type as text/html, but my post about IE still stands, it is crap.

Some people may also notice that I’ve removed the calendar from the sidebar, I just feel with the new tag cloud it’s not so much needed any more, and so it had to go. I also just generally tidied up the sidebar, something which I had been meaning to do for ages now. Most of the other changes came with the theme which did involve some cleanup operations on the database.

Overall I’m pleased with it, hope you all enjoy.

Cheers

What the bloody hell is wrong with IE you may say, why would Mark, a seemingly nice guy, refer to IE in such a cruel way. Well my friends, this time it is down to IE’s poor handling of modern MIME types.

XHTML web pages should have their MIME types set to application/xhtml+xml instead of the far older text/html. Try using application/xhtml+xml with IE though and it simply does not know what to do. I asks the user if they want to download the file rather than render it like it’s supposed to.

the modern javascript MIME type is also not handled correctly. Instead of the old text/javascript type the newer application/javascript should be used, but instead of working like a modern browser IE simply doesn’t render any application/javascript elements, it just skips over them as though they were not there.

The thing is this is not the bleeding edge of MIME types. application/javascript was registered by an informational RFC in June 2005. application/xhtml+xml was registered by an RFC in January 2002. These are not new things, in January 2002 IE 6 SP1 had not even been released yet. Microsoft have had a lot of time to get things right with regards to standards.

I want to serve my MIME type correctly on my site. I want to use application/xhtml+xml, but I cant because IE doesn’t support it. So instead I’m having to sort some horrid backwards compatible script out to server text/html for all those Internet Exploder users out there. Please IE users, take this advice, switch browsers to something more standards compliant. Safari for Windows and Firefox are both excellent choices and work far better than IE for web standards compliance. Why should you care about standards? Because if nobody followed any standards on the net then simply put the Internet would cease to exist, fragmenting into incompatible sections where only people using one certain standard could view certain parts of the net. Imagine having to use one browser to read your e-mail, another to do online shopping and then another one to go to a different shopping website. Not nice, so please for the sake of the earth use something other than IE.

Cheers