[thomasjonas]

I was just going through the list of possible interview questions (http://www.frontendhandbook.com/practice/interview-q.html)... Am I the only (mediocre) Front-end dev that has problems answering these questions? I always start doubting myself when I don't know the answer to basic questions like "Are there any problems with serving pages as application/xhtml+xml?". All these questions ring a bell somewhere, but I have no idea how to turn that into a good answer at an interview... Whenever I run into problems I just try to fix them... I'd like to think that's more important than this factual knowledge.

[callahad]

> "Are there any problems with serving pages as application/xhtml+xml?"

That was more relevant when XHTML was still vying to be the future of markup on the web. The issue was that the XHTML content type mandated a strict XML parser that hard failed if your markup wasn't well-formed, whereas HTML is more lenient. With XHTML, it was easy for a single stray closing tag to kill your entire site. This was an especially common concern if you allowed markup in, say, comments.

[atom-morgan]

> That was more relevant when XHTML was still vying to be the future of markup on the web.

Unfortunately many interviewers still ask these types of questions even if it's no longer relevant.