My website and Internet Explorer (pox be upon it)

Since Internet Explorer is completely incapable of accepting the proper Content-type for XHTML, application/xhtml+xml, and since you should never send XHTML 1.1 as text/html, I decided to change my website from XHTML 1.1 to XHTML 1.0 Strict. I didn’t really have to change anything besides the DOCTYPE, so it was a very small deal—small enough that even I can be bothered to do that much to accommodate Internet Explorer (p.b.u.i).

However, this just meant that I could legitimately send a content-type of text/html, which IE understands. It didn’t mean that my site worked in IE, and in fact, it did not.

It turns out that IE has a really, really stupid parsing bug—I cannot call it anything else. While you might easily imagine that anyone writing an X[H]TML parser would have a generic tag-parsing mechanism, where a <short_tag/> is just a <long_tag></long_tag> with an empty (perhaps null) content field. That’s how I do it. Not, it appears, IE: IE cannot parse the tag <script src="…"/>. Easy fix, but who the hell would think to look for it? —This is, by the way, a bug not just in IE6, but also in IE7. I can only hope that they’ve fixed it in IE8.

Speaking of IE8, if anyone reading this has a copy of it, I’d be interested to hear how it renders my site as compared to IE7 and/or compared to another browser (Firefox or Opera—I know it works in those). In particular, I’m not sending data as text/html to IE8 at this point; until I know that it’s broken, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and treat them as a proper browser capable of dealing with modern web standards.