Re: XML newbie

[Pete Hall <pbhall@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 09:51 05/14/2003, ZakMetz wrote:
> I like trying out "cutting edge" stuff that I can't do at the day job on
> my website. It's a truly never-ending project in which I'm always trying
> to find better ways to do things.
>
> What I don't get is how I convert my existing
> data in tables into XML efficiently and keep that XML document
> up-to-date. Am I missing the point of XML?


Zak,

You need to write XSL templates (stylesheets) to transform your XML data 
into HTML and other formats for display, printing, etc. Check out Saxon. 
It's a free XSL template processor. To get up to speed on XSLT, I recommend 
Michael Kay's book "XSLT Programmer's Reference" ISBN 1-861003-12-9. He is 
the original author of Saxon. Don't get discouraged. There's a steep 
learning curve. You need to reach a critical mass of knowledge before 
anything makes sense. It's worth it though. It's cool (and powerful) stuff. 
If your stuck/blessed with a Microsoft shop, IE 5.5 and up will transform 
the XML right in the browser. Nobody else seems to be interested in doing 
that though, so for general audiences, you'll end up doing the transform on 
the server, which is imminently doable, and only marginally more difficult 
than doing it in the browser, but a little more resource intensive for you.

hth
Pete Hall
pbhall@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.pbhall.us/