Paul M. Foster (paulf@quillandmouse.com)
Thu, 13 Jan 2000 00:35:23 -0500 (EST)
First off, thanks Kim for the excellent work! And quick too!
On Wed, 12 Jan 2000, Kim Lester wrote:
>
> Existing Doc Systems, Part 3 (XML)
> ==================================
>
<snip>
Some additions/clarifications:
XML is eXtensible Markup Language.
It is a subset up SGML, meant partially to resolve the problem HTML
presents. HTML is designed to specify the appearance of documents, but has
no provision for specifying the _meanings_ of the document. XML documents
can be thought of essentially as "free form databases" because of the way
they allow meaning to be assigned to parts of the documents. And because
of this, they lend themselves to indexing of various kinds.
XML has a set of rules that govern it, but they are few, and in some cases
more rigid than those of SGML. Since it does not require a DTD, it can be
made to cover any kind of documentation, including EDI type documents. As
noted, though, If you're going to do a lot of documents of a certain type,
you are wise to specify a DTD. This limits the types of elements and tags
to make the job of parsing your documents easier. A good example is an
invoice as represented in XML. In this case, you want certain very
specific information coded in a very specific way.
XML could potentially be a solution to translating data from one format
to another, such as Oracle to dBase. (Not really relevant here. Just a
point.)
Paul M. Foster
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Wed Jan 12 2000 - 23:29:19 EST