On Thu, 12 May 2005 02:11:16 -0500, Lauren Wilson <no****@private.com> wrote:
OK, I have been drowning in all kinds of articles about XML lately.
The ONE thing I have not yet seen is a general discussion article
about the alleged benefits of XML, especially as it affects Access
developers.
Does anyone have a link to such an article -- one that STARTS with a
general description of why XML is suppose to be better than whatever?
Thanks in advance.
I have had a chance to do a lot with XML lately, and I have a few things to
say.
First, a lot of folks who haven't played with XML, but just read about it will
tell you it's nothing new. Those people are both right and wrong.
Yeah, in one sense, XML is just a tagged file format, and yes, CSV can do a
lot of what we would use XML for just fine, but that ignores certain key
points.
1. It's a standard that a vast majority have been able to agree to share.
2. Regardless of the fact it can be difficult for a human to read, it is
nevertheless possible, and XML data really is more self-describing than CSV.
3. Standard XML parsers do a large part of your validation for you based on
the DTDs or XML Schemas for your document formats.
4. Standard XML parsers are able to apply XSLT transformations to XML data to
translate between formats. For instance, a client of 2 products from 2
vendors is likely to be able to write XSLT to translate one vendor's XML
format to the other. Since at least one of the applications probably bothered
witing the 15 lines of code or so to allow specifying an XSL Transform to
apply during load/save, you probably don't need to add an extra external
processing step.
5. Name spaces and the nested nature of XML allow you to borrow parts of other
standard schema definitions when designing your own and get increased data
portability in the bargain.
6. A single DTD or schema can define elements for a whole suite of document
types that share many common elements between them. Changes to any element
type definition are managed in one place.
7. Increased use of XML document formats allows for reduced coupling between
applications. For instance, I can use the MSXML library to generate XML from
a VB program that Excel can open directly, and do it without using Excel
automation - Excel doesn't even have to be installed on the machine that
generates the document.
Now, as far as Access goes...
From what I can see, the only really useful XML feature in Access so far is
the ability to use the MSXML library in the VBA project, which has more to to
with VB than Access per se. So far, it's been easier to figure that out than
how to use the explicit XML mapping features of Access (or Execl or SQL Server
for that matter) in any useful way. I'm pretty confident that will improve
eventually.