TalkPHP - What is XML.

TalkPHP (http://www.talkphp.com/forums.php)

- XML, XSLT, XPath, XQuery (http://www.talkphp.com/xml-xslt-xpath-xquery/)

- - What is XML. (http://www.talkphp.com/xml-xslt-xpath-xquery/1029-what-xml.html)

Since many people often ask me this question, Here are some snippets of information explaining what it is, None of it belongs to be. :p

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a general-purpose markup language. It is classified as an extensible language because it allows its users to define their own tags. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of structured data across different information systems, particularly via the Internet. It is used both to encode documents and serialize data. In the latter context, it is comparable with other text-based serialization languages such as JSON and YAML.

It started as a simplified subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), and is designed to be relatively human-legible. By adding semantic constraints, application languages can be implemented in XML. These include XHTML, RSS, MathML, GraphML, Scalable Vector Graphics, MusicXML, and thousands of others. Moreover, XML is sometimes used as the specification language for such application languages.

XML is recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium. It is a fee-free open standard. The W3C recommendation specifies both the lexical grammar, and the requirements for parsing.

Hope this sheds some light on it for people :)

People should really start becoming acquainted with the ways of XML. It's definitely the next big thing when web 3.0 or web 4.0 makes an appearance. I'm sure many will be appreciative of this information. Thanks!

RSS would be a real life example of XML.

And I've heard you can create your custom library of HTML tags which would validate with XHTML. Is this true?

Yep! Once you dive into the big, open world of XSLT where you can have any node you like, you can specify the styles for each individual node. It's what XHTML is loosely based on. Where the front-end describes the layout and the CSS describes the style. An XML node, for example <plant> means nothing on its own other than that it describes the content the node will contain - in this case a plant of some sort. It's then up to you to style it via XPath and CSS.

That's actually pretty cool, I am going to 'learn' to use it properly soon from a friend who comes down often!!

Started learning XML mates...! will join you soon in discussion with technical points.

For people who love XSLT and XML or just want to see some real life examples of it there is Symphony.
It's a great content management system with some really advanced features, it also has a great community around it.