XML is a set of rules for building a language, it's not a language
itself, so it doesn't really make sense to send "XML" to the browser
without choosing a particular XML language.
XHTML, DocBook, RSS, TEI and XTM are just a few of the thousands of
XML-compliant languages. Some languages use "<title>" to express a
heading, others use "<h1>" and others simply "<h>".
Of course it's pointless to publish any XML-compliant language if the
users can't read it. If the software doesn't understand that your
language uses "<link url=''>" for a hyperlink then it won't be able to
do what you expect (it won't be able to show people a clickable link, or
tell a search engine about another page).
On the web, search engines do not understand much other than HTML (sure
some have support for RSS, and non-XML formats like DOC/PDF, but HTML is
the dominant format). Modern browsers (IE5.5+, Firefox, Safari)
understand a conversion system called 'XML Processing Instructions'
which allow conversion from one XML format to another via XSLT. So a
browser that doesn't understand DocBook XML can follow the conversion
instructions in XSLT and make HTML. The user sees the same page, and
many accessibility features (keyboard access) will behave as normal.
That's why these example pages have their source in a foreign XML
format, but the browser can display the page as expected.
http://alazanto.org/xml/style2.xml
http://alazanto.org/xml/style3.xml
Search engines and older browsers however do not understand XML
Processing Instructions (PI) and so sending any XML format with a PI
isn't recommended. Also accessibility software that taps into the source
may not understand non-HTML languages.
If you're using XML and XSLT on the server though and only send out HTML
then the user will never know and there won't be any problems. "XML
driven websites" presumably also include ones that just use XML
internally. Server-side XML processing can either be ad-hoc
transformations (XSLT, STX), or more powerful techniques like XML Pipelines,
http://norman.walsh.name/2004/06/20/pipelines
.Matthew Cruickshank
http://docvert.org << Convert your MS Word documents to XML and any
HTML. It's Open Source.
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