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Stuff I found on ZDNet. This should be interesting to play around with when it comes out, that is if I ever get around to checking out XML. Also, who didn't see this coming?
Wednesday, October 16, 2024 @ 12:20:49 (UTC)
Wednesday, October 16, 2024 @ 08:20:49 EDT
"There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true."
Wednesday, September 05, 2001 at 22:44:52 (UTC)
XML is easy. It's all the related technologies (like DOM, XSL...) and sublanguages (like SVG) that are hard. Actually, SVG probably isn't hard.
SVG and SMIL are the open standard answer to Flash/Shockwave. If anyone ever gets around to supporting them, they should be cool.
FlyingS
Thursday, September 06, 2001 at 02:28:06 (UTC)
Brushing up on your 1337 5p34k huh FlyingS? Actually, how well is XML supported in IE and NS? Also, how easy is it to code in XML? I remember trying out a program that produced XML pages, but it was so complex, and the support for XML was limited at that time, so I dropped the project.
QYV
Thursday, September 06, 2001 at 02:45:01 (UTC)
Hey, I was 31337 before it was cool. Well, okay, I wasn't, but I could've been if I wanted to!
Unfortunately, I still don't. :)
XML is supported on IE5+ pretty well, I guess. NS4, not at all. NS6, I don't know. But it doesn't matter. You'd be better off setting up a preprocessor to convert XML data to HTML on the server using XSLT. This is nice and compatible (and you have more control over how it's rendered). It'd be nice if they had an apache module to do this automatically...
FlyingS
Thursday, September 06, 2001 at 02:47:30 (UTC)
So basically you're saying. "Don't bother yet."
<- lazy.
QYV
Thursday, September 06, 2001 at 02:58:37 (UTC)
You can't "code" in XML. Even though it shares superficial similarities with HTML, and has its roots in SGML, XML is never used as a presentation language.
Usually, XML is used as a data interface between loosely-coupled applications (say a webpage and a database backend, or a portal site and a content-syndication server). To accomplish this, a DTD or an XML Schema is defined between applications so that XML documents can be exchanged between applications in a meaningful way.
The presentation of XML data is handled using two related technologies: XSLT and XPath. Xpath is analogous to SQL in that it helps you traverse an XML tree looking for patterns to act upon, and XSLT provides a general method of transforming XML documents into either another XML document, or (say) an HTML page for presentation on a browser, or (say) a comma-delimited text file for export to a spreadsheet. XSLT and Xpath work together to make XML documents infinitely malleable.
Two "cute" things about XSLT stylesheets:
1. An XSLT stylesheet, used to transform XML trees, is a well-formed XML tree itself, with a document type definition (DTD) of "template".
2. XSLT is Turing-Complete, but is not a procedural language. Rather, it's a functional language with no side effects and (alas) no updating of variables at runtime. To accomplish things like looping, you must implement recursion. Neat!
To bring this back to SVG, the neatest thing will be the ability to programmatically alter vector graphics (in the form of XML/SVG) using XSLT's. Why is this cool? It goes beyond the manipulation of shapes using coordinates to being able to manipulate the "semantic" meaning of shapes using XSLT. Oh boy!
OK, last points: Java supports XML now. XML documents can be turned into Java objects instantly for the most optimal internal representation of that data. Also, who cares if IE and/or NS support XML? *laugh* Browsers are so passé!
Growlo<e-mail>