Re: Resources

by Peter-Paul Koch <ppk(at)xs4all.nl>

 Date:  Thu, 30 Mar 2000 20:28:46 +0200
 To:  hwg-xml(at)mail.hwg.org
 Cc:  mikec(at)bmts.com
 In-Reply-To:  bmts
  todo: View Thread, Original
>I am a little confused by this comment. The things you mention are all
>scripting languages while xml is a markup language. You're still going to
>need to script things aren't you? 

Exactly because XML is a markup language, you need some kind of script to
produce HTML that can be shown in the browser. Pure XML either shows up as
gibberish (all other browsers) or as the XML document (IE5). So somewhere
between the XML file and the HTML the browser shows there has to be a
script that handles the translation.

>How are you going to do that? 

That's THE question of the moment. If you find a good answer, you can
probably become a millionaire overnight.

>Javascript on the client? 

Maybe, but it'll only work in the Version 5 browsers because only they have
DOM's that allow JavaScript to access the XML document.

At the moment I think a server side language like Perl or ASP is the best
solution. Store the data as XML and when a user requests to see the data,
start up a script that translates XML to HTML (or WML for mobile phones)
and send it to the client.

Another idea would be to build a database that accepts XML documents as
data and XSL, XUL, XSLT:pointer and whatever X-scripts to define the way
the content is rendered. I've heard they started an open source project to
write something like that, but I don't know any details (not even the name
of the project).

>I am currently using cold fusion and xml to perform content syndication
and it >works great. I can't really picture how I would
>accomplish the same thing with xml alone. Am I missing something?

No, you can't do anything with XML alone (well, you can view the XML files,
but they only contain raw data and are not particularly user friendly).

ppk

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