Comments on: Farewell, XML declaration

By: Eric

Eric — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 11:48:06 +0000

I fought with this bug for a very long time. Instead of removing the XML declaration, I have found that sending a PHP header("Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8") and removing the content-type meta tag also keeps Exploder 6 from going into quirksmode, at least for me with my particular setup. However, I still can't send compressed CSS if I use this method, as Exploder 6 will intermittently and unpredictably fail to load the stylesheet. YMMV.

By: John A. Bilicki III

John A. Bilicki III — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 21:16:49 +0000

My site is strictly standards compliant (XHTML 1.1 as application/xhtml+xml with 1.0 Strict doctype fallback for non-XHTML browsers, WAI AAA, etc) and I find it’s actually easier to leave the XML declaration in the code always. IE5 (which is what IE6 essentially is) has a decent quirks mode. Really who wants to code to a “standard” that is anything remotely like IE5/6?

… and I’ll be using XP until Linux gurus decide to remove the need to waste time in the console just to install programs such as Firefox and Opera. It seems all OS’s are doomed to committing GUI suicide these days.

BTW… this page has an XML declaration.

By: Martin Kliehm

Martin Kliehm — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:33:19 +0000

Richard, I'm glad you clarified it and generally agree with me. In the referred document you recommend to omit the XML declaration to avoid quirks mode in IE6, but to use it always when a page is served as application/xhtml+xml. There are more disadvantages in serving a page as application/xhtml+xml, but I suppose that's a subject for another post, like “The Great XHTML Shootout.”

By the way, after I had been using Homesite for a long time (that doesn't support UTF-8 well) I switched to Aptana a couple of years ago. It's the same as Eclipse, but less resource-hungry, less Java IDE, but with more built-in front-end coding support. Also the integration of Subversive is so stable and convenient!

By: Richard Ishida

Richard Ishida — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:38:38 +0000

Well, actually I point out pros and cons, but I usually recommend to omit the declaration and use UTF-8. (And that's what I do for my own pages.)

It used to be a problem, however, when I used XMetal as my XHTML editor, since it requires the XML declaration to load the file correctly. So I had a little script that stripped off the XML declaration before uploading to the server, then replaced it.

Now I author pretty much all my XHTML in DreamWeaver, and don't need the scripts.

By: Dirk Ginader

Dirk Ginader — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:31:31 +0000

I am so going to party with you in 2014