I’ve recently discovered something else the Mozilla Firefox browser can do that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer can’t: Firefox can accept documents using the “application/xhtml+xml” header.
Who gives a shit? you might be thinking to yourself. Wait, I’ll explain. This might actually change your life someday.
For years, people have been writing web pages using the dated and somewhat arbitrary HTML 4 specification. If you don’t know what HTML looks like, take a look at the source code on any web page (by going to the “View” menu and selecting “Page Source” in Firefox or “View Source” in IE).
The problem is that during the web browser wars of the ’90s, Microsoft and Netscape both decided that they wanted their browsers to be as inclusive as possible. You could be a sloppy or an amateur coder, make all kinds of errors in your HTML, and the browser would silently compensate for you. For instance, the proper way to create a bulleted list is by using this code:
<ul>
<li>apples</li>
<li>oranges</li>
<li>bananas</li>
</ul>
But you could just as easily get away with typing this instead:
<UL>
<Li>apples
<li>oranges<lI>
<li>bananas
</ul></Ul>