The extensive guide to utilizing xml

XML is a markup language that is part of a family of associated technologies that let you work with info in a prepared method.

Due to the fact XML tags have no semantic meaning you could make use of it for all types of things from displaying content over the internet to holding data including lists of ingredients, books and so forth. The key point is that the tags don't have any semantic significance or rules in order to build your own tags for whatever function.

So for instance, you happen to be food manufacturer and you also need a document for your food labels, you could produce a complete amount of relevant tags to maintain your food label data, for example <calories>, <nutrition>, <ingredients> and the like.

Its essential to remember that XML is simply text so you can use any plain text editor to generate your XML file or if you prefer, you may use a dedicated XML Editor tool. The main advantage of the latter is you can create your XML content quicker and even more accurately as a dedicated xml tool will also have its own xml validation feature along with features like auto complete as well as syntax highlighting etc.

The other feature is that this can also examine your xml for errors for example wrong xml or extra tags or faults in the syntax and you will even specify what order the tags must appear in, what the attributes can incorporate, the values etc

After this you basically run your xml through the validator to make certain the xml data is just as you desire it.

The other benefit of xml is that you may also style up your file by attaching a css it to it, the css is made up of your style rules for example colours, font type and size etc.

To make your css work, basically save it in the same directory as the xml file and also open your xml file inside an upto date internet browser and it ought to display the xml data with your style properties.

Really the only disadvantage to be aware of with this particular technique is that your browser will have to be able to handle css and not all information can be extracted or exhibited as designed.

The way to overcome this is make use of transformations, known as XSLT, which symbolizes extensible stylesheet language. This could possibly also be used to not only convert xml, but they can also be used to change an xml file into plain html file, which can be displayed or viewed on any internet browser.

Finally, using css within your xslt you can also carry out fancy transformation which can look far better than the plain html option as a result of additional styling options which can be seen in the more recent browsers, although for older internet browsers it does not work.

There are other ways in which you may use xml as well, you can put it to use to dynamically produce html and pdf documents based on user requests, this really is extremely powerful and useful.