473,320 Members | 1,825 Online
Bytes | Software Development & Data Engineering Community
Post Job

Home Posts Topics Members FAQ

Join Bytes to post your question to a community of 473,320 software developers and data experts.

Purpose of XML for web?

I'm still quite unsure about XML's use for web development. I
understand XML is really helpful if we want to share / transfer data
between web and mobile, for instance. But I am unable to figure out if
XML is at all useful if we are only dealing with web. I think database
does a much better job for web development than XML.

I am into web development using PHP/MySQL.

Can someone enlighten me with some good examples?

Thanks a lot!!

Feb 17 '07 #1
3 3591
On Feb 17, 11:36 am, "white lightning"
<crescent...@yahoo.comwrote:
I'm still quite unsure about XML's use for web
development.
I'm not quite sure what exactly do you mean. There's about
a zillion possible uses for XML in web development. Which
one of them are you having doubts about?
I understand XML is really helpful if we want to share /
transfer data between web and mobile, for instance.
Again, you're awfully vague. "Share / transfer"? If you're
talking about storing your content as XML, transforming it
server-side to serve the resulting documents in different
formats, that's always one of the options, and it has
certain advantages over other approaches, as well as
certain drawbacks.

If you're talking about serving XML documents, that's
generally not a very good idea. XHTML support across
browsers is pretty much nonexistant, and it offers few
advantages over serving good ole HTML 4.01 Strict. Serving
XML for client-side transformations might sound attractive,
and in certain cases it might save a good bit of client's
bandwidth; but serving gzipped content-oriented HTML is
normally good enough to achieve decent response times,
while relying on UA's capability to transform XML documents
is not a very good idea, because, well, what about my lynx?
And my Win Mobile 5 PDA? (Yeah, I know, I should update IE,
I heard the latest MSXML for ppcs includes an XSLT
processor--but hey, what about the average user who can't
be bothered? For that matter, now that I think about it,
I can't be bothered either.)
But I am unable to figure out if XML is at all useful if
we are only dealing with web.
Again, I think you're misunderstanding something. 'Web'
doesn't really come into it. The reasons for using XML in
your projects normally have very little to do with UI, and
everything to do with information storage, retrieval and
interchange. XML is neither a magic bullet nor a Holy Hand
Grenade of Antioch, but it does have a certain capacity for
killing razor-fanged bunnies that tend to crop up when
you're throwing your data back and forth among a dozen
components designed by a dozen different teams working on a
dozen (okay, half a dozen) different platforms.
I think database does a much better job for web
development than XML.
?

Again, I'm entirely unsure about what you could possibly
mean? Database does a much better job at what? At being the
data format you're exchanging information between your
server and UA-based thin client in? And what about DB2 9?
I am into web development using PHP/MySQL.
So am I, I do it for living. And your point is? 'I'm a
PHP/mySQL coder, and I'm not interested in XML, or OOA & D,
or MVC, or... because that's not what LAMP development is
all about,' or something like that?

Yeah, I know I'm overgeneralizing, it's just that my
co-workers routinely piss me off with that sort of
attitude: you know, 'I don't want to learn anything, I
already know everything I might ever need'. Sorry about
that, anyway.

I'm extremely conservative at heart, and not at all into
'follow the buzzword of the weak' sort of thing. But if
you simply ignore everything new, because you 'don't get
it', even before you've actually tried getting it, it's not
only gonna ruin your career--to hell with that damned
career--you'll be stuck heating your pizza in flintstone-
powered fireplace because you're unaware of microwave. If
you're still munching your HTMLs using regexes, as we did
back in the '95, I feel sorry for you.
Can someone enlighten me with some good examples?
*sigh* Good examples of what? Are you interested in XML-RPC
and SOAP? RSS feeds? RDF and semantic web? IBM's pureXML?
XSLT? XSL-FO? Perhaps you should explain what do you intend
to use XML for, because otherwise it is impossible to
elaborate. 'XML in web development' is not something you
can write a two-page summary for. A dozen papers wouldn't
be enough to cover it in any sort of detail.

--
roy axenov

Feb 17 '07 #2
white lightning wrote:
I'm still quite unsure about XML's use for web development.
It depends what you mean by "web development".
I understand XML is really helpful if we want to share / transfer
data between web and mobile, for instance. But I am unable to figure
out if XML is at all useful if we are only dealing with web.
What does "only with web" mean?
I think database does a much better job for web development than XML.
For some applications a database is a much better idea than XML, but not
all. Here's a document from a large collection for which we are the
project is developing a new interface to serve on the web:
http://celt.ucc.ie/published/G100001A.xml -- a database would not be a
meaningful way to store this text.

XML is good for storing text, especially complex, hierarchically-related
text, because that's what it was designed for. As you say, it's also
turned out to be fairly good for data transfer between disparate
systems. But I wouldn't want to use it to store several billion customer
account records for a realtime banking operation like an ATM system, for
example, although it might be quite good for the messaging between
component sites.

///Peter
--
XML FAQ: http://xml.silmaril.ie/
Feb 18 '07 #3
I guess it gets even fuzzier when you consider some vendors, like
Oracle, have XML Type DBs, which allow you to store XML documents *as
XML* and query them using XPath/"standard" SQL and return XML or
"rows" - confusing times indeed!

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tec...ldb/index.html
Feb 19 '07 #4

This thread has been closed and replies have been disabled. Please start a new discussion.

Similar topics

14
by: Mudge | last post by:
This thread is hereby dubbed PHP Purpose, or PHPP. It has the following purposes: 1. To bring together PHPers and programmers around the world to become organized. 2. To dicuss purposes of...
4
by: Dado | last post by:
I lost the point: What is purpose of putting objects to null: If I make a class, JFrame for example, with button which start connection dialog, which is class with connection and statement...
6
by: Maarten van Reeuwijk | last post by:
Hi group, I need to parse various text files in python. I was wondering if there was a general purpose tokenizer available. I know about split(), but this (otherwise very handy method does not...
14
by: copyco | last post by:
Can anyone tell me what the purpose is to adding items such as a VBScript file or HTML document to your VB.NET project? Once you have these things added, how to you access them and use them in...
0
by: Nak | last post by:
Hi there, I'm slightly confused regarding the purpose of this method "SetSaveLicenseKey" which is part of the LicenseContext object. I had first presumed that it was used to "cache" a license...
6
by: John Machin | last post by:
Hi, In general, I'm mainly interested in a template engine for dynamic web pages but would like a general purpose one to avoid learning yet another package for generating e-mail messages, form...
5
by: vapour | last post by:
Hi, Quick question here, and wondering if anyone can help. I often see the hash character ('#') in regular expressions and am wondering what purpose it is supposed to serve. Example: ...
0
by: Irfy | last post by:
Could someone elaborate on the purpose and concrete usage scenarios of references to functions. What can references to functions do that pointers to functions cannot. Why are they in C++? A swap...
6
by: parag_paul | last post by:
hi All, I have no idea why I need to learn a new scripting language, nothing much to the sytnax, I need to understand what could be the prupose of another scripting language Cna you please...
8
by: parag_paul | last post by:
I saw an implementaiton with protected constrcutors. What could be use of this construct be?
0
by: DolphinDB | last post by:
The formulas of 101 quantitative trading alphas used by WorldQuant were presented in the paper 101 Formulaic Alphas. However, some formulas are complex, leading to challenges in calculation. Take...
0
by: DolphinDB | last post by:
Tired of spending countless mintues downsampling your data? Look no further! In this article, you’ll learn how to efficiently downsample 6.48 billion high-frequency records to 61 million...
0
by: ryjfgjl | last post by:
ExcelToDatabase: batch import excel into database automatically...
0
isladogs
by: isladogs | last post by:
The next Access Europe meeting will be on Wednesday 6 Mar 2024 starting at 18:00 UK time (6PM UTC) and finishing at about 19:15 (7.15PM). In this month's session, we are pleased to welcome back...
0
by: Vimpel783 | last post by:
Hello! Guys, I found this code on the Internet, but I need to modify it a little. It works well, the problem is this: Data is sent from only one cell, in this case B5, but it is necessary that data...
0
by: CloudSolutions | last post by:
Introduction: For many beginners and individual users, requiring a credit card and email registration may pose a barrier when starting to use cloud servers. However, some cloud server providers now...
0
by: Defcon1945 | last post by:
I'm trying to learn Python using Pycharm but import shutil doesn't work
0
by: Shællîpôpï 09 | last post by:
If u are using a keypad phone, how do u turn on JavaScript, to access features like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram....
0
by: Faith0G | last post by:
I am starting a new it consulting business and it's been a while since I setup a new website. Is wordpress still the best web based software for hosting a 5 page website? The webpages will be...

By using Bytes.com and it's services, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

To disable or enable advertisements and analytics tracking please visit the manage ads & tracking page.