I understand from anecdotal reports and my own experiments that it is
possible to get most (recent?) browsers to sensibly interpret and render
well formed XML that "looks a lot like" HTML. With much of HTML, this is
just a matter of matching case and closing </LI> etc. The treatment of
HTML's <HR> and <BR> as <HR /> and <BR /> is, it seems, workable.
I'd very much like to hear that these anecdotes are true, and that
someone somewhere has undertaken a more comprehensive survey of browser
behaviour. I guess something like this must be going on in the
HTML-futures area -- if so a URL pointer would be very much appreciated.
Thanks for any references,
Dan
ps. reason I'm asking is that it would be nice (in various contexts) to
be able to have a namespace URI dereference to something that contains
both human-readable and browser displayable (X)HTML but that also
contained machine oriented definitions. Content-negotiation would
be another approach but might complicate cacheability of the
delivered document... (?http cacheing experts please correct me on this)