Re: XML..............?

At 02:46 PM 10/13/1999 +0500, belal(at)mathtech-pk.com wrote:
>I wonder if some body can refer me to a site authored in XML and what is
>the coding style in XML (any coding example is welcome)

Hi, Belal, I think this is going to be a common question from
web designers.  The problem is that the question is effectively
meaningless.

XML isn't the same category of beast as HTML.  HTML is a specific
markup language defined by SGML; SGML is a way of creating markup
languages.  A meta-language, if you will.

XML is also a meta-language; it's defined by SGML too, but XML is
used for creating other markup languages for representating data
and information.

No sites are really "authored in XML" -- well, that's not really
true per se.  Some sites do indeed use XML on the back end, for
representing content before it gets sent through the server to
the web browser.  An XML language (which could be very simple and
minimal) would be defined to store their data, and then that would
be processed on the server side and set to the browser.

But what gets sent to the browser?  Ah, there's the rub.  A web
browser is expecting something in a language it can understand.
So the web server will typically convert the data into HTML, since
most web browsers understand that language.  (An alternative would
be to convert the data into WML, the WAP forum's XML-based markup
language for use on internet-connected cellular phones.)

Now, to confuse you even further, there's a "new" version of HTML
that's called XHTML.  Remember when I said SGML is the way that
HTML was defined, and also that XML is a language for defining
languages?  Well, XHTML is simply HTML 4.0(1) defined using XML
instead of SGML.  Functionally, it looks pretty much like HTML and
if done with a little care, can be read equally well by any browser
that currently speaks (SGML-based) HTML.

Why would anyone want to create HTML-defined-by-XML?  Because of
the way XML is built, you can do a lot of neat things, such as
conversions, quick parsing, modularization, and extensions to
languages defined in XML.  XHTML, therefore, has all the benefits
of being an XML-based language, while still offering the functionality
of HTML that we've all come to know and love.

For more information on XHTML you can read the XHTML spec, especially
the part about changes from/compatability with (SGML-based) HTML.
The spec is linked from the HWG homepage on the right hand side, or
you can go directly to:

     http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/

Are sites using XHTML?  I'm not entirely sure who, but I'm certain
some must be.  The HWG's site is currently written in HTML 4.0, not
XHTML, because the XHTML specification is still going through the
W3C's standards track and is still a proposal.

I hope this answers your question (and those of others on the list);
if I misinterpreted anything, my apologies.

--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn(at)hwg.org>
President, Governing Board Member
HTML Writers Guild <URL:http://www.hwg.org>
Director, Accessible Web Authoring Resources and Education Center
  <URL:http://aware.hwg.org/>

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