XML in Action

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dos1d

Hi board can anyone give me some examples of what developers do with XML. I understand that it offers a lot of flexibilty with data and the web. Has anyone actually seen the technology in action. If I were a webmaster why would I want to use XML?

Thanks for your time.

Robert_Wellock

My own site is in XHTML which is an application of XML therefore: http://www.xhtmlcoder.com/worthvalley/ is an example of XML in the form of eXtensible HyperText Markup Language.

Although I presume you wanted to see raw XML 1.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xslt-19991116.xml which tends pretty look boring unless you apply style via Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL), CSS or use eXtensible Stylesheet Language Tranformations (XSLT) to transform the XML: http://www.zvon.org/index.php?nav_id=home&mime=xml_xslt .
Although XML itself doesn't do anything basically XML was designed to describe data and focus upon what data actually represents, so has multiple applications not just to help display webpages, plus it is platform independent.

sheila

XML and XSLT combined seem more flexible than conventional databases, such as Access. I'm slowly converting each of my websites so that ALL the data I need is stored in XML files. It's then extracted and 'transformed' using XSLT and ASP. It makes it very easy to use the same data for different purposes.

dos1d

So far from what I have seen is that XML improves your ability to manipulate data such as from data bases. Thanks to all that replied to my post. In particular Shelia, I take it that you have benefited some how by coverting your web pages to XML. Since you mentioned access: Has XML enabled your site to function as a small data base? What I am looking for is testimonies of how web developers have used XML to perform some function that HTML alone has not allowed them to acomplish easily. By the way I am a student in Computer Information Systems. I have decided to do a business report on how implementing XML could be a benefit.
Any replies are greatly apreciated, you people are awsome!!!
I hope that one day I will build the same skills that you all seem to have.

thanks again

sheila

I think there are quite a few sites using XML now. Here's the address of my only site so far to be completely sourced from data in XML files:

http://www.pimlico.westminster.sch.uk[/URL]

dos1d

Sheila,
I checked out you site it is awsome! I was interested in the area where a person fills out a form for staff vacancies. Are you manipulating that data for a data base using XML? If so what where you doing before you where using XML? Did you benefit from xml on the site index?

Thanks for repling!:p

sheila

Thanks! The application form is actually the newest part of the site (posted last night!). The form itself is just straight HTML (but generated from an XSLT template matching those specific pages on an XML file that maps every page on the site.

The search function (top-left) is courtesy of Atomz, although I hope to create one myself one day - I'm just worried that it might be slow using XSLT.

The site index page is generated from the aforementioned XML file that maps all the pages, for example:

<site>
<page id="home" href="index.asp">
<title>Pimlico School - Home Page</title>
<content>
<p>Welcome to Pimlico School. Check out our headmaster's <cross ref="about-us-headmasters-welcome">mug shot</cross>.</p>
</content>
<sub>
<page id="about-us" href="about/intro.asp">
... etc ...
</sub>
</page>
</site>

That's a simplified version, each <page> actually contains much more detail.

Hope I've managed to explain it clearly enough.

singularit

Hi Dos,

We have just released our XML based interface technology. You can view our demosite and download the technology (for evaluation only) and documentation from it too. it is a RAD tool for creating and integrating web interfaces and it adds powerfull user interaction to web based interfaces. Also it can reduce serverload up to 50 times.

regards,

SingularIT

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