And one of them was Erik Naggum, who understood the Web but hated it. He probably wasn't the only one who self-selected out of the pool of possible XML inventors...

BTW, it's mentioned in another thread above that you're not sending a Content-Type header — are you doing that on purpose? I haven't tried doing that since HTTP/0.9 days and I'm surprised it works (i.e., that modern browsers sniff the body and render it as HTML).