Tom Morris: 2007-10-23

2007.10.23

Solving MIME type headaches 2007-10-23T10:09:38Z

My site occasionally serves invalid XML. This is an unfortunate business. The reasons are quite convoluted, but are to do with the way that you can't use CDATA sections inside attributes (Kosso will understand what I'm talking about).

So sometimes unencoded stuff is sent to the browser, or, as this morning, an unclosed span element.

I decided to fix it by writing some code that would detect whether what's about to be sent is valid XML. Simple enough. Just load it all into a DOM tree, and if it chokes on loading, it's not valid XML - then serve it as text/html to invoke the usually slower XHTML parsers.

Here's the code. It's done with PHP output control and the DOM - so PHP5 only, folks. You do use PHP5, right?

Comments

blog comments powered by Disqus

Tom Morris tom@tommorris.org

Currently in: Kent, England

Usually in: East Sussex, England

I am a vegetarian, an atheist, like to code in Ruby and Scala (and Java, but let’s not talk about that), and noodle about with microformats and the Semantic Web.

I have an MA in philosophy from Heythrop College, University of London. My philosophical interests are in analytic metaphysics, ontology, modality, the work of Armstrong, Lewis, Kripke, Russell and Plato. I have a strange, unfulfilled interest in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. I’ve been influenced by Gadamer, by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Rawls and Nozick.

Musically, I like jazz fusion, soul and P-Funk. My musical nirvana would be a mixture of Beethoven, Miles Davis and George Clinton topped with a side-serving of Erykah, Jill and Angie.

I also write for the Citizendium, an online encyclopedia project. If you know about stuff, you should join in. I occasionally produce audio recordings for The Pod Delusion.

Elsewhere:

Subscribe:

RDF

« October 2007 »
Su	Mo	Tu	We	Th	Fr	Sa
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31

View in month context

On this day in: 2006 2008 2009