Tom Pike: Question: Does Google support pages sent as application/xhtml+xml ?

No.

Call this anecdotal if you like, but a few days ago I mentioned two products which have been widely reviewed, and yet my entry appears fairly high on the search results. Pleasingly, traffic is starting to flow to that post, particularly when these proct names are combined with the word “Ubuntu”. I hope that these people found something that they consider useful.

The next day, I nixed content negotiation for my home page.

The day after that, I referenced a new tool created by Morten Frederiksen. Echoes of my post were picked up by Google, but the original was not. Joe’s post ( served as faux XHTML to Google ), however, does rank highly — what’s up with that? .

It is my belief that the W3C could learn a lot from the way the Python 3000 effort is being planned, and in particular the plans to back-port changes to Python 2.6 (and 2.7!) that will ease the transition.

But mostly what will drive the transition to Python 3K is that people will start writing code that only works w/Python 3.0. I don’t begin to presume that I have enough clout to move the mighty Google to action, but perhaps if the folks at the W3C who authored or supported the XHTML standard had created enough meaningful content and served it with the proper media type, Google (and Microsoft!) might have put XHTML support a bit higher on the priority list.

Update: now my post is top of the search results. Manual intervention? Google dance? I’ll probably never know...