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Re: [LUG] more study required - RE: What I've found so far XML



Roland Tarver wrote:

Hmm. tired & confused. gonna read some more and get to the bottom of this
puppy! ;)


Let`s simplify a bit...



might have a bash at some practical eg's of these different scheme's &
applications. That always helps me understabd thing faster/better/ at all!



Right on. Clarification will be forthcoming when you establish a practical use
for this stuff and try to code it up; without doing so you can do all the reading in the
world and it will amount to wasted time.


Neither of these so called meta-languages do anything useful on their own but
they *do* allow the definition, as previously mentioned, of new markup
languages. These will be referred to, as pointed out by Steve, as
`applications'.


So what? What happens then?

Well, potentially once you have established a common format for the storage and
exchange of data you can do some groovy stuff - try to think beyond the stages
of just data display.


XHTML is an application of XML used to display data in a browser - look at the
relationship between the different players in this example and recognise the
requirements:


XHTML defined in XML understood by BROWSER looked at by YOU.

But you *could* define your own markup language. Why not attempt to do so? As
an incredibly lame example you could formulate a language for describing your
record collection and call it RCML or something...


Then what?

Well, since it ends in `ML', the impulse is going to be to see if you can make
it display in a browser - fine, get it out of your system. But why stop there?
Having got that far it is only a short step to pass this data around other
custom applications you have knocked up


...and now it gets interesting.

If you know a bit of Perl, hit CPAN and have a look at all the XML-related
modules there are to play with. If you are running Windows and have ActiveState
odds are you already have XML::Parser installed. If Perl is not your thing
there will be similar toys for other languages.


> what would you use to write an SGML doc? notepad?
>

Yes, you can write your documents in Notepad.  Microsoft also supply an XML
editing tool called XML-Notepad which is okay, but what about XML being the
*output* of another application eh?  How about that?



Then what would you open it in? IE?


You can display an application of SGML (HTML) in IE, a different application would need to be parsed elsewhere. If you write a well-formed XML document, IE will display it with syntax highlighting but do nowt more until you tell it to - go play with Neil`s examples some more and adapt them to your own needs.


MB




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