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Why is the Docutils XHTML served as “Content-type: text/html”?

April 26, 2017content Docutils html served text type XHTML

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Why is the Docutils XHTML served as “Content-type: text/html”?

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Full question: Docutils’ HTML output looks like XHTML and is advertised as such: But this is followed by: Shouldn’t this be “application/xhtml+xml” instead of “text/html”? In a perfect web, the Docutils XHTML output would be 100% strict XHTML. But it’s not a perfect web, and a major source of imperfection is Internet Explorer. Despite it’s drawbacks, IE still represents the majority of web browsers, and cannot be ignored. Short answer: if we didn’t serve XHTML as “text/html” (which is a perfectly valid thing to do), it couldn’t be viewed in Internet Explorer. Long answer: see the “Criticisms of Internet Explorer” Wikipedia entry. However, there’s also Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful. What to do, what to do? We’re damned no matter what we do. S