Re: XHTML vs HTML media types

[Mark Baker <[e-mail]>]

Dan Kohn wrote:
> 
> Well, I hardly see this as life-or-death, but the intro paragraph of
> <http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/> says:
> 
> "XHTML is a family of current and future document types and modules that
> reproduce, subset, and extend HTML 4 [HTML]. XHTML family document types are
> XML based, and ultimately are designed to work in conjunction with XML-based
> user agents."
> 
> XHTML, especially 1.1+, is more than just HTML reformulated in XML.  The
> modularization is a fundamentally new thing (as you of course know, Larry).
> Based on this, XHTML seems to describe what XHTML is better than HTML does.
> The +xml in the name is first and foremost a syntactic convention to
> indicate support of the XML syntax (the fact that it's also a semantic
> convention as well is an extra benefit).  So, I'm still for
> application/xhtml+xml.

Right.  I think my previous email expressed the same concern.

> Separately, I agree a reference to RFC 2854 is critical.  And further, I
> think the registration should have a detailed discussion on file extensions.
> On my laptop, .html files open in IE and .xhtml in XMLSpy.  It's not
> immediately obvious to me that if I upload a .xhtml file to a web server,
> what is the best default MIME type mapping for that file?

There's not exactly a "detailed" discussion on file extensions, but it
ties in closely with the discussion on recognizing XHTML documents, and
the dangers of assuming that the processor will further dispatch on a
namespace (my 2c contribution to draft-murata-xml).

Anyhow, there's no point getting into that much further now until the WG
is ready to publish it.  When the draft is announced, I'll be sure to
forward it here (or however that process works - I have to recheck the
order of operations).

MB