In the last few months I have put a lot of effort into making this blog fully standards compliant. It hasn't been an easy endeavour. Not because the specifications are hard to learn or implement but rather because there seems to be so little regard for them among the big web players. The latest surprise is a reference to our blog in the Google search results.



For all browsers except Internet Explorer I am setting the content-type as "application/xhtml+xml" which is 100% legal as far as I am aware. The W3C seems to agree. Yet Google reports this site as having an unrecognised file format. I don't get it. Tag soup is treated as legitimate mark-up and fully compliant web pages get flagged as having an unrecognised file format.

Sam Ruby's blog, which escapes unscathed in the Google search results, also has a content type of "application/xhtml+xml" but he doesn't have either a full doctype declaration or the top XML tag I have in this page. He also declares the content-type in his meta tags which I have avoided because I am setting the content-type dynamically to avoid any possible IE problems with "application/xhtml+xml". I guess I am going to have to make more changes to appease everyone.

What really concerns me is that if we can't get standards right on the desktop, how on earth are we going to get it right on mobile phones? The mobile internet has a massive mountain to climb in this regard.