Misconfigured MIME types on certain old web servers would display the raw data of any file.
I had an Executive who wanted to watch a Video from some “Motivational Speaker” (scam artist) on her iPad.
The Scam Artist (Motivational Speaker) had it wrapped in a Flash Applet and when she contacted them about not being able to watch the video, he started soap boxing about how terrible iPhones and iPads were and that Apple is Doomed.
I checked the website and found that the MP4 file had the MIME type Octet/Stream instead of Video/MPEG4 and I created a dummy xHTML page with the appropriate tags.
The video worked perfectly on her iPad and her husband went on to watch the video, believed the “Motivational Speaker” and was fleeced for thousands of dollars.
The structure was meant to be more strict syntactically, but almost universally browsers didn’t give a shit because it was way better for users to just “do your best” to process broken or sloppy xhtml/html
That being said, some of the rules meant to enhance the rigidity of html were brought in from the xhtml spec to HTML5.
While browsers will still do a “best attempt” at rendering the page, most websites aren’t even written in raw HTML anymore by devs, it’s either front end single page apps populating the dom or backend generated templates spitting out generated HTML, most of which generally follow the rules of html (except Wordpress, which needs to die in a cave)
Well Akshually.
Misconfigured MIME types on certain old web servers would display the raw data of any file.
I had an Executive who wanted to watch a Video from some “Motivational Speaker” (scam artist) on her iPad. The Scam Artist (Motivational Speaker) had it wrapped in a Flash Applet and when she contacted them about not being able to watch the video, he started soap boxing about how terrible iPhones and iPads were and that Apple is Doomed.
I checked the website and found that the MP4 file had the MIME type Octet/Stream instead of Video/MPEG4 and I created a dummy xHTML page with the appropriate tags.
The video worked perfectly on her iPad and her husband went on to watch the video, believed the “Motivational Speaker” and was fleeced for thousands of dollars.
I’ve never quite managed to understand what the point of xHTML even was. Damn near all of the time, it was still sent as plain ole HTML
The structure was meant to be more strict syntactically, but almost universally browsers didn’t give a shit because it was way better for users to just “do your best” to process broken or sloppy xhtml/html
That being said, some of the rules meant to enhance the rigidity of html were brought in from the xhtml spec to HTML5.
While browsers will still do a “best attempt” at rendering the page, most websites aren’t even written in raw HTML anymore by devs, it’s either front end single page apps populating the dom or backend generated templates spitting out generated HTML, most of which generally follow the rules of html (except Wordpress, which needs to die in a cave)