No XHTML support in IE 7

This is excellent news. No, I’m not joking.

We have fixed the DOCTYPE switch so it will skip an XML prolog, so that valid XHTML can be handled in strict compliance mode rather than quirks mode. […] I should say that IE 7 will not add support for [application/xml+xhtml …]

[I]f we tried to support real XHTML in IE 7 we would have ended up using our existing HTML parser (which is focused on compatibility) and hacking in XML constructs. It is highly unlikely we could support XHTML well in this way; […] we would silently support invalid cases. […] I would much rather take the time to implement XHTML properly after IE 7, and have it be truly interoperable – but I did want to unblock deployment of XHTML as best we could, which is why we made sure to address the XML prolog/DOCTYPE issue.

Excellent.

I personally am more excited about this than any other news from the Internet Explorer team.