intertwingly

Are you aware that none of those pages work in IE anymore? Or was that intentional?

Elliotte Rusty Harold Apparently Google does not recognize XHTML, at least not when served as application/xhtml+xml. Try this search which should return exactly one hit pointing to an XHTML document. Notice that the file format is “unrecognized”...

James: IE doesn’t support XHTML.

IE doesn’t support XHTML.

And yet it is still capable of viewing this page which is also XHTML (only not served as application/xhtml+xml). I’m not entirely sure what Sam was trying to achieve, but I just wanted double check that he was intentionally preventing IE users from viewing those particular pages in case it was a mistake.

I’m not entirely sure what Sam was trying to achieve

Neither am I.  But I will note that to date I have yet to see a single complaint from an IE user.  For three of the four pages I mentioned, there are only trace amounts of IE visitors.

But I will note that to date I have yet to see a single complaint from an IE user.

When I set up a wiki for my class, before I had yet implemented Content-negotiation, it took over a week for one of the IE-using students to complain that they were unable to access the site.

I suspect that IE users are so accustomed to their browser misbehaving that they are reluctant to complain, even when they can’t see your page.

It’s difficult for ie users to leave a complaint when they can’t get to the page in the first place...

It’s difficult for ie users to leave a complaint when they can’t get to the page in the first place...

I would be curious to know how you managed, given that the User Agent associated with your post was as follows:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)

I clicked on the post in Bloglines. Coming in through the index page still doesn’t work for me.

Hah! put me down as an IE7 user who didn’t complain... I use IE7 predominantly at work, but when I tried loading up intertwingly.net/blog I got the little File OpenWith/Save dialogue and figured you were doing something with content-negotiation, only because I know you like to break the internets

So I loaded it up in Firefox, and sure enough, find this post

-p

I can confirm what Peter M Howard said above - when browsing with IE 7, I get the File/Open dialog.  When using Safari it works without any problems.

It’s bad enough that IE doesn’t understand XHTML served properly, but doesn’t Google have some Mozilla-based bots now?  One would think that they would be smart enough to get XHTML working over at the 'plex.

Since Google happily indexes (RSS and Atom) feeds, their bots are perfectly capable of handling content served with an XML MIME-type. No need for some new, Mozilla-based, creation. The issue is whether they recognize application/xhtml+xml, and treat it as anything other than a generic XML document.

Tom Pike:  No. Call this anecdotal if you like, but a few days ago I mentioned two products which have been widely reviewed, and my entry appears fairly high on the search results.  Pleasingly, traffic is starting to flow on that entry, partic... [more]

Trackback from Sam Ruby

I had similar problems. I eventually decided I would only server my xhtml with a content type of “application/xhtml+xml” to Firefox. Googlebot and IE both get “text/html”. It’s frustrating! I wrote about it here.

[link]