oh man, haha, who ever thought this was a good idea…

<view page source>

“John only considers me an acquaintance?!”

From this page [1], there is apparently a site that'll allow you to look up relationships:

> Phil McCluskey has written an XFN Relationship Lookup Engine. Introducing rubhub.com:

I was very hesitant to click that link on my work machine. But it turns out that GrubHub now (anti-)typosquats their own domain. (EDIT: Nevermind, it just don't exist anymore. Stupid browser was trying to be helpful on my behalf)

[1] http://gmpg.org/xfn/more

In the late '90s, I was a grad student working on AI agents and Web distributed-humans stuff.

While trying out some else's new social semantic graph setup, I added links to people, including an undergrad assistant from our research group.

This might've been uncool, even then, because the cheeky undergrad accepted, but coded my role to him as "service provider".

As a point of comparison: MySpace launched that same year, and one of it's most prominent features was displaying your 8 closest friends in ranked order.

It was a different time :)

Ooh, blast from the past. I wrote some Erlang code to crawl this stuff back in college. Just found it, wow: https://code.google.com/archive/p/erlysocial/

Cool find!

One thing to note is that is what was, long ago, pitched as "Web 3.0"; a "semantic web" where all relationships between entities could be expressed in code.

Ironic how so many of the kids currently pushing "Web 3.0" as crypto and NFT scams weren't even alive when "Web 3.0" as XHTML and Semantic Web were a big thing.

My web goes to 11.

This is how Mastodon verified links work.

This page is delivered with the media type of text/html, not application/xhtml+xml. So it's not even using XHTML.

Do MIME types in HTTP headers affect how browsers render content? As far as I know most static web servers simply have a mapping between file extensions and MIME types that they send for response headers and that it's up to the DOCTYPE and quirks of the browser to determine how the page itself is rendered. Since this page's DOCTYPE is...

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

...I'd say it absolutely is XHTML (assuming that it reasonably validates as such, i.e. closes all tags and so forth). Have things changed recently in this regard?

The rendering differences in modern browsers are actually way more lenient. By the spec: If it’s served from DISK with that header, it’ll be rendered as XHTML, with the accordant failures. If it’s served from web, and has a Content-Type, this overrides DOCTYPE. (Ex, if you wanted to show it as text…) This will cause the page to be rendered in “quirks mode” in older browsers, or as a standard HTML page in modern browsers. application/xhtml+xml is as different from text/html as text/plain, and they all absolutely change the rendering pipeline — or should.

The difference in rendering lies in invalid XML documents — if you skip a closing tag in XHTML, the page should error and REFUSE TO RENDER. At all. Just display an error message to the end user. If your webpage doesn’t do this when it doesn’t have matching tags, it is not being rendered as XHTML by the spec.

> Do MIME types in HTTP headers affect how browsers render content?

You can test it with the following snippet:

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <head><title>test</title></head>
    <body>
    <h1 style="color:green"><span style="color:red" />If this text is green, this file was parsed as XHTML</h1>
    </body>
    </html>

With Content-Type set to "text/html" the text will be red, with "application/xhtml+xml" it will be green.

> Do MIME types in HTTP headers affect how browsers render content?

They absolutely do matter. To make an extreme point, if that page was served as text/plain, then the browser would show the literal XHTML source code on screen. Auto-sniffing the type based on the content is a big no-no where we learned lessons about vulnerabilities like ~20 years ago.

The text/html and application/xhtml+xml modes have many subtly different behaviors. XHTML supports things like <![CDATA[ ... ]]> and requires namespaces like <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">, <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">. XHTML requires well-formed elements, so no <b><i></b></i>. XHTML treats <div/> as identical to <div></div>, whereas HTML5 interprets it as just <div> with no closing.

Here is my guide on XHTML, and the page itself and entire website is served as application/xhtml+xml: https://www.nayuki.io/page/practical-guide-to-xhtml

Small error in that sample script:

    let elem = document.createElement("img");
    console.log(el.tagName); // el is not defined

It's the web server that happens to be configured to return the mime type text/html, not the document, which is clearly labeled and formatted as proper XHTML:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

Nevertheless, it’s going to be rendered as an HTML document by the browser (with an invalid doctype) — the web server told it to!

Wasn't there some issue with IE or something that prevented people from using the right mime type? I swear there was something like that going on back in the day.

edit: yep https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/2.1.x/htmlfaq/

Can't wait for xxxHTML and xxHTMLxx

I kept wondering how stupid this seemed today but it looked so interesting then.

It sounds like a special interest group for Quaker web designers.

Wow. Includes an early use of “blog.”

Not that early. "Blogging" started to become popular in 1999.

Wow, according to Wikipedia, the first use of the term "blog" was May of 1999, when "web log" was turned into "we blog" as a joke, and the company Blogger launched in August of 1999.

is the word "blog" used differently today ? (excuse my ignorance, I'm so old that I don't get what you guys are talking about)

It means the same thing now. A regularly updated newsfeed. An online newsletter.

Perhaps worth mentioning that since 2004 there are RDFa and FOAF, serving a similar purpose (among other things). While XHTML is merged into HTML 5 (XHTML5).

I kind of like it.

It's so curious to visit sites and look 20 years into the past, where not everyone was on Facebook or whatever and we didn't even quite know what works and what doesn't. Just experimenting with new ideas that sort of could have been a thing (fediverse/web rings), but didn't pan out.

Of course, people might prefer to keep the particulars of their relationships with others a bit more private than XFN would have you do. Regardless, it's very interesting when even old sites like that stick around and you can see those old ideas in great fidelity, perhaps sans a CRT monitor.