XHTML in IE9

IE9 is the first version of Internet Explorer to natively support XHTML. For those not familiar, XHTML is the XML serialization of HTML. Among other benefits, XHTML can help maintain cleaner markup due to its fail-fast nature in the face of parsing errors. You can see IE9 running XHTML for yourself by visiting examples on the Internet Explorer Test Drive site like SVG Helicopter, IE Beatz, and SVG-oids. In this post I’ll share a few details about XHTML and IE9's support for it.

What version of XHTML does IE9 support?

The short answer is XHTML5 (defined by the HTML5 specification). This means that new HTML5 elements such as <canvas>, <audio>, and <video> are all supported by XHTML in IE9. In fact, all of the same HTML (and SVG) elements and attributes that can be used in HTML in IE9 can also be used in XHTML in IE9. Moreover IE9 continues to follow "Same Markup" principles with XHTML just like with other parts of the platform, meaning most of the same XHTML markup should "just work" in the same way across IE9, Firefox, Chrome, etc.

How do I use XHTML in IE9?

Adding a <!DOCTYPE> pointing to an XHTML DTD does NOT influence whether a page is treated as HTML or XHTML. XHTML support for files on the web can only be triggered by the MIME type of the response from the web server. This is true both in IE9 and other browsers. This MIME type should be "application/xhtml+xml" (though you can technically use any supported XML mime type). Local files with ".xht" or ".xhtml" extensions will also be opened as XHTML.

Read more: IEBlog

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