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Re: [LUG] Open Source Day - sxi perl notes



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On Saturday 15 June 2002 4:09 pm, Jonathan Melhuish wrote:
On Saturday 15 June 2002 05:02, you wrote:
I've yet to learn anything about XML and I have also never come across an
sxi file b4 (the file I downloaded was called "presentation.sxi.zip") -
is it an archieve type thang?

I'm also trying to look at the info in windows which I'm assuming I can
do? (sxi could be a linux specific file???)

Any pointers would be very well received - Thanks a lot have a great
weekend

I really don't know anything about XML, although I would certainly like to
learn more if anyone can suggest any sites that could introduce me to the
concept.

http://www.codehelp.co.uk/

IE4 or later will load XML (actually it will load XSLT and render XHTML but 
that is another issue), other browsers will be directed to plain HTML pages 
and some XHTML pages that can be viewed in all the browsers I have tested 
(including Mozilla, Lynx, Konqueror, Galeon and Opera). (The HTML/XHTML was 
simply created by writing XML and using XSLT to transform it into HTML.) The 
site aims to explain the basics of XML, XSLT and DTD's. (However, DTD's are 
old-hat and the new in-thing in XML is Schemas, XPath and XLink. These are 
not covered because (quite simply) there isn't a browser that has implemented 
them yet!!)

All I know is that the whole idea is that it is cross-platform, and should,
theoretically, allow any application to 'understand' any form of data fed
to it by another application.  Meaning IE should be able to render
StarOffice documents (in theory).

True. 

I have also written a C++ program that can parse one specific DTD controlled 
set of XML files and produce output in Windows, xterm and KDE. One engine, 
three outputs. The XML itself is browseable using IE. So as well as XML being 
cross-platform (ANY OS capable of parsing a text file can support it - after 
all, if a mobile phone can do it (with a little help from the gateway) so can 
the fridge!) the XML data engines can be cross-platform too. Java would seem 
a good route here. I'm sticking to C++, I don't need to port this to a non 
C++ environment and I do want to have separate functionality in the Linux 
version - the Windows program is purely data entry and storage, Linux will do 
the comparative data mining stuff.

All I can suggest is going online whilst viewing them; I'm guessing from
the output that it needs to load the stylesheet (or DTD, or whatever
they're called) from the 'Net?

Probably. Note the difference:
An XSL stylesheet is for the style - fonts, positioning, colour, tables, 
lists, logos, meta tags, titles, all the things that make the WWW pretty.
The DTD is a definition, it is for validation, it doesn't have any role in 
the actual display of the file. It serves to explain the customised format of 
the XML itself.

Note also that CSS stylesheets can also be used for browsers like Opera that 
can understand XML but not XSLT. The main limitation here is not being able 
to create HTML style links between browsed XML documents like you can with 
XSLT. CSS is limited to purely style, XSLT is a transformational stylesheet - 
it can do both the style work AND transform the data into another text 
format, e.g. PHP, WML, HTML, CSV, ASCII, RTF, etc.

e.g. HTML4 has a DTD. WML (wap) has a DTD. The two are not the same (not even 
in 1% of elements) and explain to the browser which tags can be expected 
where. CodeHelp has it's own DTD and this is specifically for that one site - 
not applicable anywhere else on the web.

EVERY XML file will contain a reference to the stylesheet AND the DTD. Just 
check the first four lines of each file.

- -- 

Neil Williams
=============
http://www.codehelp.co.uk
neil@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
neil@xxxxxxxxxxxx

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