Simon Willison’s Weblog

Hixie on WaSP

13th June 2002

Hixie has been poking around the new Web Standards Project site, and he is not impressed. His analysis of the site makes interesting reading, with complaints including CSS colour and background not being set at the same time and the content-type of the document being set as “text/html” rather than the more correct “text/xml” required for XHTML documents.

Some of his points seem overly picky, in particular the content-type issue. I checked a site Hixie mentions as sending the correct text/xml content-type header in NS4 and, as I suspected, NS4 popped up a “download” box and failed to render the page. I also checked out the W3’s XHTML home page —XHTML1.0 strict and a content-type header of text/html. His other points seem worth thinking about, but I would not consider any of them to significantly dilute WaSP’s message.

So respect to Hixie for taking on the mantle of the ultimate standards advocate, but you can take a good thing too far.