[consulting] XHTML doctype

[Troy Arnold]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 01:26:18PM +1000, Jeff wrote:
> Thanks Brian, a most interesting topic.

++

> Firstly, a silly question — would you mind telling me how to use  
> Firebug to examine the response? I looked everywhere and didn't find  
> the "application/html" you mentioned.

* Visit the page you wish to examine
* Open firebug
* click on the 'Net' tab
* Enable the Net Panel, "Support for Network monitoring" 

You should now see a list of all the requests and responses associated with
the current "page". Expand to see the response and/or request headers.  The
list of requests will be updated as you open new pages.  This monitoring
will remain enabled for the domain until you turn it off.  I often forget
and haven't noticed any obvious sluggishness...

An even quicker method for terminal junkies:
Install the LWP::Perl module and you'll have some
nice utilities such HEAD, GET and POST.  HEAD is useful in this case, see
below.  

> Second, since sites such as drupal.org are written in XHTML,  
> presumably they too are not being served with an xhtml mimetype or IE  
> would die on them, as indeed would any browser if a node had invalid  
> markup (quite possible, since d.o allows user-submitted HTML markup to  
> a degree sufficient to break XHTML structure).

Yep:

$ HEAD http://drupal.org/ | grep -i content-type
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

-t