What are the advantages of creating web pages with XML instead of HTML?

Question

From time to time, I see web pages whose content is solely written in XML (not HTML or XHTML). These pages usually have some style sheets (either XSLT or CSS) attached to them w

Answer 1

Personally, I don't understand it either though one of the biggest problems is support in IE. I created a skeleton ecommerce site serving XML, transformed by XSLT and styled using CSS. I sorely missed the ability to use XLink and other wonderful XML features. It's also nice to be able to tag the data for what it is. I used a 'menu' tag for the restaurant menus. 'price' tags for prices and so on. If a user clicked on a link to change menus, all I had to do was send the name of the item, the price and the description instead of the complete page. iirc, a 4K or more HTML menu page was only 200 bytes of sent data.

As far as the "one error makes everything crash in XML" type comments, the same is true of any programming language so proper coding should be no bother for programmers and careful HTML/CSS types.

Before anyone says that what I did was actually XHTML...no. I served XML. I did call up XHTML namespaces when needed for links, images and HTML type things but only when necessary.