New Safari Browser for Windows & the WMP 11

Starting with the Windows Media Player (WMP) 10, Microsoft has made it
available only for a Windows XP OS or above. Thus most other OSs are
stuck with a WMP 9 or earlier version. Since Apple very recently
released a beta version of their Safari browser for Windows, I was
interested in seeing how it would handle the latest WMP 11.

The Safari browser for Windows seems to handle the WMP 11 player
fairly well. Here is a test embedded wmv video that works on it as
well as on IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Seamonkey, and Opera. If it does not
show an embedded player on Safari for windows, you likely need to
download a plugin available from Apple just as you sometimes do for
Firefox and some other non-IE browsers. See http://www.cwdjr.info/video_extreme/cancanWMVtest.html
.. This is a rather high resolution video designed for broadband.

The Safari for Windows, as well as nearly all recent browsers other
than IE, will handle true xhtml served properly as application/xhtml
+xml. I have a page http://www.cwdjr.info/video_extreme/cancanWMVtest2.xhtml
served as true xhtml 1.1. It of course can not be viewed on any IE
browser. It views correctly on Firefox, Mozilla, Seamonkey, and Opera.
On Safari for Windows the page works. However the WMP is not embedded
properly and you have to click the link at the top of the page to go
directly to the WMP player instead. Since very few media pages are
written and served as true xhtml (you have to associate the
extension .xhtml or .xml with the mime type application/xhtml+xml on
the server, since .html is reserved for normal html), this bug likely
will not be noticed by many.

I have played around with this a little, but what is causing this bug
does not seem to be something simple. It is very strange that the
problem does not occur on an html page if proper player plugins are
installed. Also it is interesting that there is no problem with the
xhtml page if an embedded Real player and Real video are used. If the
problem is within the WMP 11, it could be extremely difficult to run
down. The WMP is about the size of 3 or 4 lean browsers such as
Firefox or Opera. I doubt if there are many who know the minute
details of how it works, even at Microsoft. And since Microsoft does
not support true xhtml in their IE browsers, I doubt if one could get
them very interested in what is going on.