Vdiscussion » XML

Style sheet linking in XML

ma.vinothkumar — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:28:10 +0000

This technique, you link a style sheet to the XML document. A style sheet is a separate file that contains instructions for formatting the individual XML elements. You can use either a cascading style sheet (CSS)—which is also used for HTML pages—or an Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) style sheet—which is considerably more powerful than a CSS and is designed specifically for XML documents.

Does XML Replace HTML ?

ma.vinothkumar — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:27:16 +0000

Currently, the answer to that question is no. HTML is still the primary language
used to tell browsers how to display information on the Web.
With Internet Explorer, the only practical way to dispense entirely with HTML
when you display XML is to attach a cascading style sheet to the XML docu-
ment and then open the document directly in the browser. However, using a cas-
cading style sheet is a relatively restrictive method for displaying and working
with XML. All the other methods you’ll learn in this book involve HTML. Data
binding and XML DOM scripts both use HTML Web pages as vehicles for dis-
playing XML documents. And with XSLT style sheets, you create templates that
transform the XML document into HTML that tells the browser how to format
and display the XML data.
Rather than replacing HTML, XML is currently used in conjunction with
HTML and vastly extends the capability of Web pages to:
I Deliver virtually any type of document
I Sort, filter, rearrange, find, and manipulate the information in
other ways
I Present highly structured information
As the quotation at the beginning of the chapter states, XML was designed for
interoperability with HTML.

What is XML ?

ma.vinothkumar — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:24:37 +0000

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language, was defined by the
XML Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This group
described the language as follows:
The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a subset of SGML…Its
goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed
on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. XML has been
designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both
SGML and HTML.

As you can see, XML is a markup language designed specifically for delivering
information over the World Wide Web, just like HTML (Hypertext Markup
Language), which has been the standard language used to create Web pages
since the inception of the Web. Since we already have HTML, which continues
to evolve to meet additional needs, you might wonder why we require a com-
pletely new language for the Web.