Quote Originally Posted by jscheuer1
I did get Opera and FF to recognize the page as xhtml locally but, the script still ran in OP.
Hmm, so it would. It shouldn't. That behaviour might change in future.

any external css not in lowercase was ignored in both browsers.
As I said previously, case-sensitivity is important in XHTML. All element names and attributes of HTML origin must be in lowercase. Both scripts and style sheets must be prepared for this.

FF even said it was application xml/xhtml
application/xhtml+xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>
Be warned that a XML prolog sends IE into quirks mode, but then you wouldn't be serving 'true' XHTML to IE anyway. Just thought I'd mention it.

Care to post a generic version with comments and best spot to place it on the server?
The directive I posted before really is it. However, if MIME type updates really should be made in the server-wide configuration file.

The problem with .htaccess files is that they are parsed on every request. That isn't just every request for an HTML file, but for every image, script, and style sheet, too. In fact, any .htaccess files that exist in the directory tree from the document root, down, will need to be parsed, combined, and applied as appropriate.

That is, if the path to a file is:

/a/b/c/x.html

and there are .htaccess files in '/' and '/a/b/', then both will be parsed as the server makes its way to 'x.html'. This is because they apply to subdirectories as well as the current directly. Conversely, the server configuration files are only parsed once when the server is started, and never read again unless restarted.

Note that this performance hit actually occurs if .htaccess files are enabled at all, as the server still has to search for them. However, if it finds them, it will have to do the extra work of parsing and applying them.

Would having identically prefixed files like:

index.html

and

index.xhtml

Be a plus or minus and why?
There's no particular problem with doing that, but what are you doing to provide access to index.xhtml? A browser won't find it by itself.

Mike