Re: text/html for html and xhtml

> but right now the only technically standards-compliant way to have
> MathML in XHTML is to serve the  document as application/xml or
> text/xml, without an XHTML doctype, 

Personally I tend to use application/xml for various reasons, but I
don't think the above is true. The relevant RFC is rfc3236 defining
xhtml+xml which is explictly aimed at languages defined via xhtml
modularisation, thus includiing xhtml+mathml+svg.


http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3236.txt

says

      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.

Thus serving the document as application/xhtml+xml with an  XHTML+MathML
doctype is perfectly standards conformant, and works in browsers even,
although sadly google doesn't seem to like it too much. If you serve the
pages as application or text /xml google does seem to index them correctly
see for example 

http://www.google.co.uk/search?%3Aofficial&hs=mPh&q=site%3A+www.nag.com+f08aef

which today, from here, returns the (xslt styled) text/xml document

http://www.nag.com/numeric/fl/manual/xhtml/F08/f08aef.xml

as the first hit.

David