[uf-discuss] mime types and microformats

[Rob O'Rourke]

Ben Ward wrote:
> On 1 Feb 2007, at 15:37, Rob O'Rourke wrote:
>> If (x)HTML documents when served as text/html are treated as HTML how 
>> are the microformats still working? Does this mean microformats will 
>> work under an HTML 4.01 doctype?
>
> Microformats are generally parsed absolutely fine in both XHTML and 
> HTML, for one of two reasons:
>
> � Some parsers (such as JavaScript bookmarklets) parse the HTMLDOM 
> with script, after the browser has done its parsing so at that level, 
> it makes no difference whether the document is HTML or XHTML.
> � Other parsers (such as X2V) use an XSLT stylesheet to convert from 
> XHTML into vcard or icalendar. These first run pages through a tool 
> called Tidy, which converts HTML to well formed XHTML to allow the 
> XSLT to run.
>
> Basically, microformats are easier to parse directly if you use 
> mark-up that validates as XML (the mime type doesn't make a difference 
> in practice), but since open source tools exist that makes switching 
> HTML into XHTML simple, real world parsing is very tolerant.
>
> Ben

I see, clever stuff. Thanks for clarifying Ben.