Giving up on application/xhtml+xml
Until today, I had been following the recommendation of the W3C Validator and serving the XHTML pages of this blog as application/xhtml+xml (to all clients except Internet Explorer). Unfortunately, it appears that Google just doesn't like to index application/xhtml+xml, as the bizarrely incomplete search results for this site seem to confirm.
Since having my site properly indexed is more important to me than strict MIME-type adherence, I've changed my server configuration to send a content type of application/xhtml+xml only to the validator. All other user agents get Apache's default (text/html).
Apparently, I really enjoy seeing clean markup-validation results, since there doesn't seem to be any other benefit to worrying about W3C-recommended content types.
Update: Since the Google search results for this site are now sensible, it seems like my assessment of the situation was correct.
Tags: meta
Wed, 17 Oct 2007 22:56 UTC