XML Sitemap rendering as plain text

Question

I have an XML Sitemap that needs to be rendered properly when accessed on a browser.

See code below.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<urlset
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml http://www.w3.org/2002/08/xhtml/xhtml1-strict.xsd"
xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"   
>
<url>
    <loc>https://www.brideonline.ru/_____PassioanteLady.html</loc>
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="ru-us" href="https://www.brideonline.ru/profile.php?Language=Russian&#038;ID=_____PassioanteLady&#038;Language1=1"/>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.1</priority>
</url>
<url>
    <loc>https://www.brideonline.ru/___Alisa___.html</loc>
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="ru-us" href="https://www.brideonline.ru/profile.php?Language=Russian&#038;ID=___Alisa___&#038;Language1=1"/>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.1</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

However, when I try accessing it on a browser, it only shows as plain text.

Any help/explanation why it renders as plain text is very much appreciated.

Thank you.

Ailurophile

What browser are you using? Chrome won't render xml in any pretty format for you. Try firefox or internet explorer – Yellowknife

@Yellowknife I tried viewing it using different browsers (IE Edge, Chrome, FF and IE 11) but it's still rendering the same plain text format. But if I view the page source, it does show as XML format. – Ailurophile

Answer 1

So after many hours of googling and doing a lot of trial and errors, I managed to fix my problem with the help of this link: Google multilingual sitemap issue

By changing the declaration from this (using http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml):

<urlset xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml http://www.w3.org/2002/08/xhtml/xhtml1-strict.xsd" xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

to this (using http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/xhtml11_schema.html):

<urlset xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/xhtml11_schema.html http://www.w3.org/2002/08/xhtml/xhtml1-strict.xsd" xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/xhtml11_schema.html">

Now when the XML file is accessed on the browser, it now returns XML format and not plain text.

Hope this may help others in need. :)

Ailurophile

This works to see the correct XML format on the browser, but Google doesn't recognize the sitemap, I get this error when I submit the sitemap to Google search console: "Your Sitemap or Sitemap index file doesn't properly declare the namespace. Line: 2" – Indemonstrable