* Fahad Ashfaque wrote in microsoft.public.xml:
>I've been having problem dealing with IE 6 when serving XHTML Document, 
>could anyone please tell me why microsoft is denying and not making the IE to 
>support XHTML. Has Microsoft any problem making the IE like that?.

Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001, RFC 3236 which defines the
application/xhtml+xml media type was released in 2002. Obviously, it
was not really possible to support the type in 2001. Note that XHTML
1.0 has been published in early 2000 and it took the W3C *two years*
to agree on how XHTML 1.0 should be used on the web; I suggest to
blame W3C for delivering the specifications so late.

>I am sending the MIME Type application/xhtml+xml when serving the xhtml 
>document but IE popup the file download dialog.

Also note that support for XHTML is not as easy as simply supporting
this media type, there are many differences between HTML and XHTML
and other browsers do not support XHTML that well as you might think,
the Opera browser for example does not support XHTML 1.1 and did not
support the <script> element in XHTML 1.0 documents until version 7.5.

The Mozilla family of browsers cannot render XHTML documents while
loading them and there are bugs in the XHTML implementation, the FAQ
at http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/faq.html#xhtmldiff has
the details. That said, it's pretty easy to extend Internet Explorer
to have similar support for XHTML, but such an extension is not that
useful.

>IE 6 cannot open the http://www.mozillaquestquest.com/
>
>it shows the source tree.
>
>Why it is like that?

Showing the source in this case is perfectly fine behavior, it's a
text/xml document, there is no standard that requires Internet
Explorer to do something else with such documents. One can even
argue that treating such documents as XHTML is actually incorrect.
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