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There has been a bit of confusion about this question, so let restate
succinctly the query.
Question: What content type should be used for XHTML fragments stored
independently of any XHTML document?
Example: "this is <em xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml ">really</em> cool"
Context: An application (e.g. a wiki or a newsfeed) might elect to store
snippets of XHTML information in independent files, and later assemble
these bits of comments into a single XHTML document to present to the
browser. Obviously the application must be able to distinguish between
plain text files and markup files---otherwise it would be ambiguous
whether "this is <em xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml ">really</em>
cool" should be integrated into the XHTML document as a plain text
string (and therefore '<' should be encoded as <, for example), or
whether the string should be interpreted as actually defining a
hierarchy of XHTML elements.
Relevance to www-html: RFC 3236, "The 'application/xhtml+xml' Media
Type" ( http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3236.txt ), clearly states, "Please
send comments to www-html@w......." (section 1). This is not a "how
to" question, but a "which one" question.
Related Text from RFC 3236:
With respect to XHTML Modularization [XHTMLMOD] and the existence
of XHTML based languages (referred to as XHTML family members)
that are not XHTML 1.0 conformant languages, it is possible that
'application/xhtml+xml' may be used to describe some of these
documents. ...
Although conformant 'application/xhtml+xml' interpreters can
expect that content received is well-formed XML (as defined in
[XML]), it cannot be guaranteed that the content is valid XHTML
(as defined in [XHTML1]). This is in large part due to the
reasons in the preceding paragraph. (section 2)
Possible Responses:
* Use "application/xhtml+xml", because this content type can be applied
to XHTML content that does not constitute a complete XHTML
document---but wrap the fragment in an outer element such as "<span
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml ">this is <em>really</em> cool</span>".
* Use "text/xml" or "application/xml" and wrap the fragment in an outer
element.
* Use "application/xml-external-parsed-entity" and wrap the fragment in
an outer element.
Is there no specification that defines the content type of an XHTML
fragment? XHTML requires an <html> element for XHTML documents, but it
seems to me that a "marked-up XHTML string that is not an XHTML
document" is a very common use case. Therefore so it's necessary to
determine what the standard content type would be for such an XHTML
fragment.
Garret
