Posted by cwdjrxyz on 05/02/07 19:02

On May 2, 11:29 am, Toby A Inkster <usenet200...@tobyinkster.co.uk>
wrote:
> cwdjrxyz wrote:
> > An xhtml page can be all html, all xml, or any combination thereof.
>
> An XHTML page is always all HTML *and* all XML by definition!
>
> > If the xhtml page contains some xml content, the xml likely will not
> > work properly if it is treated as text/html.>


> Assuming that you mean pages which extend XHTML by using elements from
> other namespaces, yes you need to use an XML MIME type for these if you
> expect them to work, but they're not valid XHTML anyway.

One can serve only a html page such as html 4.01 that does not include
xml code. One can serve only an xml page that does not include any
html content. Often a "reader" or "viewer" program is required for
many xml languages on current browsers. The intent of xhtml is to
allow both what we use on an html and xml page to be served on the
same page according to some defined rules. With the present state of
browsers, we still may need a "viewer" or "reader" program to render
the content based on xml in a usable form. Thus I would say that an
xhtml page can contain what we could serve as html 4.01, for example,
or it can contain what we could serve as xml for example, or both. Of
course when an html page is converted to xhtml, xml rules take over
and everything must be closed, etc. This is because xml is much more
fussy about exact fromat than html. The structure of xhtml is much
closer to xml than html.

As an example, how do you serve a SMIL page as on a xhtml page? One
way is to use a recent Real player to handle the SMIL xml language.
One can for example use a .rpm playlist/redirector Real file to direct
to the SMIL external xml file so that Real player kicks in and handles
the SMIL file. The page validates properly as xhtml if correctly
coded. At some point hopefully most browsers will support W3C SMIL 2
directly so that you do not have to use a viewer program. In that case
the SMIL xml would be handled directly by the xhtml page.

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