These are the results of five test cases intended for mobile browsers. The purpose is to find out whether mobile browsers actually support XHTML or if they just eat everything as tag soup.
Of 19 UAs, 9 passed the first test, 19 passed the second test, 3 passed the third and forth tests, and 18 passed the fifth test.
| UA | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Default browser for Sprint Toshiba VM 4050 | FAIL | PASS | FAIL | FAIL | PASS |
| Default browser for Nokia 6170 Mobile Phone | FAIL | PASS | FAIL | FAIL | PASS |
| SIE-C72/16 UP.Browser/7.0.2.2.d.7(GUI) MMP/2.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 | FAIL | PASS | FAIL | FAIL | PASS |
| Opera Mini 2.0.3920 (Advanced - MIDP 2) | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS |
| Opera/8.01 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/2.0.4062; en; U; ssr) | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS |
| Nokia5140i/2.0 (03.34) Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLD-1.1 | FAIL | PASS | FAIL | FAIL | PASS |
| Blackberry8700/4.1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/100 | PASS | PASS | FAIL | FAIL | PASS |
| SonyEricssonZ520a/R3F Browser/SEMC-Browser/4.2 Profiles/MDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 UP.Link/6.3.0.0.0 | FAIL | PASS | FAIL | FAIL | PASS |
| Default browser for Nokia 6102i | FAIL | PASS | FAIL | FAIL | PASS |
| Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; PalmSource/hspr-H102; Blazer/4.0) 16;320x320 | PASS | PASS | FAIL | FAIL | PASS |
| Default browser for MotoRazr V3i | PASS | PASS1 | (False) PASS | (False) PASS | PASS |
| LGE-VX8100/1.0 UP.Browser/6.2.3.2 (GUI) MMP/2.0 | FAIL | PASS | FAIL | FAIL | PASS |
| EudoraWeb on Kyocera 7135 with PalmOS 4.1 | FAIL | PASS | FAIL | FAIL | FAIL |
| Xiino 3.1.4E on Kyocera 7135 with PalmOS 4.1 | PASS | PASS | FAIL2 | FAIL2 | PASS |
| Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Series60/3.0 Nokia6630/4.06.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1) | FAIL | PASS | FAIL | FAIL | PASS |
| Default browser for Samsung D500 | FAIL | PASS | FAIL | FAIL | PASS |
| Opera Mini on D500 | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS |
| Mozilla/4.0 (PSP (PlayStation Portable); 2.00) | PASS | PASS | FAIL | FAIL | PASS |
| Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.1; U; en-us) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413 | PASS | PASS | FAIL | FAIL | PASS |
application/xhtml+xml and promts for an external application.
The default browser for MotoRazr V3i got false positives for 003 and 004; if 003 was modified to start with a tag then it would render fine, and 004 says "PASS" because <style> is an unrecognized tag. Thus, this demonstrates that the only mobile browser that was tested that supports XHTML is Opera Mini. All browsers tested support HTML, but most aren't quite compatible with desktop browsers in their error handling. All browsers (except EudoraWeb) pay attention to the Content-Type header though, but most seem to think that application/xhtml+xml is equivalent to text/html.
Amusingly, S60 WebKit was hacked to not support XHTML, dispite WebKit actually having support for XHTML.
The conclusion I can draw from this research is that the claim that XHTML would be needed for mobile devices is simply a myth.
Simon Pieters