XML is a mark-up language that had been devised originally as method for carry and also display data separately of any software or platform, its underpinning objective was to enable richly structured documents to be viewed over the internet in a absolutely consistent fashion, regardless of the internet browser utilized or even the browser version. Nevertheless right now developers continue to dispute the value of XML over HTML and whether or not we need XML at all.
Yet concerns to one side, XML is considerably stronger than HTML for the reason that its significantly more adaptable, HTML offers, and indeed predefines, rigid tags for your data, as an example title should be contained inside the title tag, body elements ought to be contained within the body tag and so forth.
XML nevertheless helps you construct your own tags as it only specifies the standards with which you can define your tags, which means you utilize any description you wish to label your tags or containers and you could specify an endless selection of languages founded on the standards that happen to be defined by XML, and for that reason XML is a lot more like a meta-mark-up language.
Strengths Of XML
XML has a range of major advantages, the most noteworthy and also obvious of which include;
• You are totally free to employ your own mark-up elements or tags and will be able to even mark-up tags on the fly that formerly did not exist.
• XML provides far superior and significantly richer facilities for browser presentation and performance.
• XML provides incredible compression abilities that are considerably larger than HTML or standard text which provides XML a overall performance advantage in data streaming.
• XML data is a great deal more vibrant and rich simply because of the better hypertext linking functionality of XML versus HTML.
Weaknesses of XML
As well as its advantages, XML also has a amount of disadvantages, the most prominent and apparent of which include things like;
• XML can be astonishingly large and burdensome, which unfortunately is why in some areas such as web services, JSON has grown to be the chosen choice.
• XML is not yet wholly developed to provide total flexibility in engaging in any programming task, in terms of full standards compliance. XSL and XSLT are a step in the correct track nevertheless they also are far from being in a suitable state.
• XML Hypertext Transfer Protocol (XML-HTTP) complications continue to exist.
Over-all XML is a significantly more advanced way of working with data, even so if you are going to be developing XML based web applications it is important to comprehend the disadvantages and demands that might possibly impact the functioning of any XML server.
For example the kind of data, the ratio of tags to text, attributes to elements not to mention even the quantity of waste white space can all influence on the capabilities of any kind of XML server.
One more excellent factor with XML is the the introduction of DOM, thanks to Microsoft, DOM stands for for Document Object Model and is invaluable tool for loading and parsing XML files. DOM is a superb way to browse through your files, to gather information and to manipulate those files.
It’s in addition a fantastic way to work with your XML files and in particular is best for generating and displaying XML documents using code such as ASP and Visual Basic, you may furthermore utilize XML VB tools such as MSMXL and Liquid XML Visual Basic to aid in parse, edit and create your VB code from your XML.
Monday 13 August 2012
Tuesday 7 August 2012
An Uncomplicated Account of XML And Visual Basic
Visual Basic is an exceedingly important programming language and thus it is worthy of further deliberation and also explanation. Nonetheless to be more exact, Visual Basic by far the most regularly used programming language in the world.
The most obvious reason for this success is due in great part due to the simplicity, you can create simple effects like “Hello Word” in just a few lines of code rather than several thousand, its simple and easy does the job with minimum fuss and complexity.
The latest variation of Visual Basic is Visual Basic 6, a bye product of Microsoft’s Visual Studio. Surprisingly Visual Basic features no native support for XML, a common and popular markup language but nonetheless, Visual Basic is now being regarded by a good number of coders as a good way to work with XML.
Despite the fact VB features absolutely no component or apparatus to read, write or make xml, or even a data engine to assist or even operate with xml, you will find parsers (MSXML parser or Liquid XML Studio) that you can use to work with VB and XML as it exposes the same interfaces in VB as with XML.
XML Parsers just like the Microsoft MSXML parser and Liquid XML Studio, do the job by using the DOM or Document Object Model. The DOM is constructed of 5 various essential pieces, attributes,documents, elements, nodes and nodelists.
Every one of these has got their own unique programmatic interfaces (specifically, DOMDocument, IXMLDOMNode, IXMLDOMNodeList, IXMLDOMElement, and IXMLDOMattribute), each of which reveal a number of methods and properties.
For instance, the DOMDocument interface is made for coping with loading and saving of XML files (through .load, .loadXML--which changes an XML structured string into an internal DOMDocument--and .save), and the IXMLDOMElement interface handles referencing attributes, content text, and element children, and offers a beginning point for generating XPath queries.
Xpath is regarded as the favored choice for XSLT users when trying to pick out nodes with an xmltree. This capability to pull nodes out of an XML DOM is the main reason that parsers are extremely popular, the MSXML parser can carry out Xpath queries which enables it to reference any nodes within an xmltree using rather complex queries.
XML is hierarchical by nature and so whilst it would appear easy enough to populate and represent XML as a tree, this isn't always the case in reality you may not need to accomplish this, by way of example you will prefer to bypass some braches or nodes.
In reality, you might simply want to develop a treeview structure that displays only the most relevant nodes, you might furthermore wish to be able to choose the nodes, causing more in depth information to appear in the right hand pane of your application. This is typical of most Explorer-type applications.
One way where you can achieve this is to code the desired functionality that will expose your XML, directly into your program. Even so this isn’t ideal and may actually cost time and effort because you must recompile your application every time you want to change the display, worst still it means fooling with heaps of unpleasant DOM code. The best option will be to move the layout instructions to an XSLT stylesheet which will subsequently style the xml data into a format well suited for processing.
Conversely you should use any of the preferred xml vb parsers or if you need to generate code from your XML, try Liquid XML Visual Basic to generate your VB code automatically.
The most obvious reason for this success is due in great part due to the simplicity, you can create simple effects like “Hello Word” in just a few lines of code rather than several thousand, its simple and easy does the job with minimum fuss and complexity.
The latest variation of Visual Basic is Visual Basic 6, a bye product of Microsoft’s Visual Studio. Surprisingly Visual Basic features no native support for XML, a common and popular markup language but nonetheless, Visual Basic is now being regarded by a good number of coders as a good way to work with XML.
Despite the fact VB features absolutely no component or apparatus to read, write or make xml, or even a data engine to assist or even operate with xml, you will find parsers (MSXML parser or Liquid XML Studio) that you can use to work with VB and XML as it exposes the same interfaces in VB as with XML.
XML Parsers just like the Microsoft MSXML parser and Liquid XML Studio, do the job by using the DOM or Document Object Model. The DOM is constructed of 5 various essential pieces, attributes,documents, elements, nodes and nodelists.
Every one of these has got their own unique programmatic interfaces (specifically, DOMDocument, IXMLDOMNode, IXMLDOMNodeList, IXMLDOMElement, and IXMLDOMattribute), each of which reveal a number of methods and properties.
For instance, the DOMDocument interface is made for coping with loading and saving of XML files (through .load, .loadXML--which changes an XML structured string into an internal DOMDocument--and .save), and the IXMLDOMElement interface handles referencing attributes, content text, and element children, and offers a beginning point for generating XPath queries.
Xpath is regarded as the favored choice for XSLT users when trying to pick out nodes with an xmltree. This capability to pull nodes out of an XML DOM is the main reason that parsers are extremely popular, the MSXML parser can carry out Xpath queries which enables it to reference any nodes within an xmltree using rather complex queries.
XML is hierarchical by nature and so whilst it would appear easy enough to populate and represent XML as a tree, this isn't always the case in reality you may not need to accomplish this, by way of example you will prefer to bypass some braches or nodes.
In reality, you might simply want to develop a treeview structure that displays only the most relevant nodes, you might furthermore wish to be able to choose the nodes, causing more in depth information to appear in the right hand pane of your application. This is typical of most Explorer-type applications.
One way where you can achieve this is to code the desired functionality that will expose your XML, directly into your program. Even so this isn’t ideal and may actually cost time and effort because you must recompile your application every time you want to change the display, worst still it means fooling with heaps of unpleasant DOM code. The best option will be to move the layout instructions to an XSLT stylesheet which will subsequently style the xml data into a format well suited for processing.
Conversely you should use any of the preferred xml vb parsers or if you need to generate code from your XML, try Liquid XML Visual Basic to generate your VB code automatically.
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