RE: HTML to XML, vice versa

["David Morris" <dmorris@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tony,

As you have pointed out XHTML is the successor to HTML. One advantage 
that you have with data defined using XML is that it can be transformed to 
another format.  This means that you do not have to do this coding yourself, 
but can have someone else do the work.  For example you can code your 
decorator in java to support a specific translation of an HTML <DT> to an 
XHTML <dt> or an XML <car>.  This support in many cases would be 
implemented as part of a parser that adds this final decoration. You can 
use a several other methods that are defined as part of XML to perform 
this transformation. 

There are three main ways to do this, you could use XSLT, which is fairly 
widely supported and tested.  XSL, which is less widely supported but more 
capable, or you could use a parser and java? to write your own.  In almost all 
cases it is best to do this transformation on the server because even though 
these technologies are supported in the most recent versions of the popular 
browsers, the browser support is inconsistent and in some cases still buggy.

David Morris

>>> tony.goodwin@dact.demon.co.uk 03/07/01 02:24AM >>>
I think you should perhaps be thinking about xhtml.

xhtml 1.0 is the successor to HTML 4.0 and is meant to be a XML compliant
grammar of HTML.
As yet no browser supports it, but check out www.w3c.org If you are
designing a method of creating XML from HTML, you may well want to make
xhtml the output of such transformations.
If so, you can use any standard xml parser and the DTDs provided by the W3
forum for xhtml to validate, translate.

Also font and other such tags should always be placed in a stylesheet.


BTW there is a utility XML tidy which can change HTML to XHTML(it can also
place font etc into a document level style) - again see above site

Tony



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