RE: XHTML vs HTML media types

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.

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?

		- dan
--
Dan Kohn <mailto:[email protected]>
<http://www.dankohn.com>  <tel:+1-650-327-2600>

-----Original Message-----
From: Larry Masinter [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, 2000-10-18 14:06
To: Mark Baker; Dan Kohn
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: RE: XHTML vs HTML media types


RFC 2854 describes the applicability of 'text/html'; I would like to
ask that any document that talks about the any other MIME type that
might be used at least refer to it.

I actually think that the double 'x' in 'xhtml+xml' is redundant,
and that 'application/html+xml' might be more appropriate.