xml-dev - RE: Real XML Site

[Didier PH Martin <martind@netfolder.com>]

Hello Ed,

Ed said:
Yeah, that's interesting. It's definitely not valid XHTML. But transformed
XML doesn't have to be valid anything, does it?

The pages are very different based on the browsers we're using, so at least
the concept of divorced content is being used. There's almost no way short
of asking to find out what's going on behing the scenes, is there?

Ed

> From: Ben Sarsgard [mailto:BSarsgard@Versient.com]

> What's going on there?  It just looks like HTML to me.
> There's illegal
> characters in the javascript, and the img tags aren't closed.
>  Am I missing
> something, or did they just take an html document, and save
> it as .xml?
>

Didier replies:
It is possible that the xml document is transformed on the server side. Even
if you refer to an XML document, this latter could be delivered as HTML.
What could be happening is:

a) the server detects the user agent making the request
b) the server associates an XSLT stylesheet to transform this xml document
into an appropriate format understood by the user agent.
c) the server sends the transformed document.

This is also why you see the URL ending with a ".xml". The HTTP request is
really for an XML document, but the server having detected that the user
agent does not support XSLT may have performed the transformation on the
server side and delivered an HTML document in response to the ".xml" URL
request.

Several xml servers are precisely doing that.

Cheers
Didier PH Martin
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