Microsoft/Windows Internet Explorer and XHTML Error

Vložil xkucf03, 5. Září 2010 - 22:01

Maybe you know this story: you typed an internet address into your browser or clicked some link and… no web page is displayed – instead there is download dialog like this one: This is very unfavourable because you can't read the web page – it is unlike other web imperfections and incompatibilities which causes broken design or layout of the page. In this situation the browser fails in its main task: viewing web pages.

How to solve this?

You can go away from this website. But what to do, if there is something important for you and you want to see it?

Switch to other browser. This could be stimulus for you to use better software. Every other popular web browser is able to display that web page. You are free to decide. You can use Firefox (free software), Chrome or Chromium (free software), Opera (proprietary), Safari (proprietary), rekonq (free software) or some other browser. All of them are good web browsers and are capable to bring web pages to you. But some of them are better – you probably will prefer the free software (Svobodný software).

Repair your crippled Internet Explorer. If you have to use Internet Explorer, you can make it a little bit better (but not good). You can update your Windows Registry with this file which contains:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MIME\Database\Content Type\application/xhtml+xml] 
"CLSID"="{25336920-03F9-11cf-8FD0-00AA00686F13}" 
"Encoding"=hex:08,00,00,00 
"Extension"=".xhtml"

After that, Internet Explorer can display the web page. It is not perfect, but it is better than downloading the file and reading it in notepad.exe – which is very user unfriendly way to browse the web (probably „the Microsoft way“).

Technology behind that

You may ask: Who caused this? Whose fault is it? The web page is written in XHTML. XHTML is popular standard/format for making web pages. It cames from World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The standard says that these pages should be served to clients as application/xhtml+xml MIME type (and that text/html MIME type is not suitable for serving XHTML pages). So, the web page is 100% valid and is served to clients with correct MIME type. On the server side is everything OK. The browser (Internet Explorer) is broken. Other browsers are able to display that page.