designer lost in XML world - anyone got a map? — OZONE Asylum, home of the Mad Scientists

XML - XSL - XSLT - XHTML - CSS - DOM

designer lost in XML world - anyone got a map?

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Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	I agree with Slime wholeheartedly on this. XML is not like normal programming, not at all. To begin to understand XML and how to use it I had to look at it in a completley different way, this is roughly how I approached it. XML alone can't really do anything but store data in a very structured way and an XML-file alone can only be read and shown by a few newer browsers. To be able to show the data from the XML-files in different media (browsers, PDA's, Cellphones and more) you need to transform it to the correct format for the chosen media. You need logic, processing and transformation. And here comes the next step: XSL and XSLT These are files that holds all the instructions on how to process and transform the XML data to a format for presentation, ex HTML and CSS In here you can use XSL/XSLT to loop through XML elements and apply styles/html to them (transforming), there are a lot of methods to traverse through the XML-tree up and down and sideways to find the elements you need to transform. And finally the presentation part, this is for the web some version of HTML and CSS. As you see it's not that different in structure from a three tiered application. Presentationlayer = HTML/CSS Logic = XSL/XSLT Storage = XML Then what I did was to start writing down small assignments of my own, like a miniature two page website with a menu and content. Content in XML, processing in XSLT, and presentation in HTML. This forced me to get into a whole lot of things... 1. You need a developing enviroment (webserver) that supports XML/XSLT, like Cocoon or Forrest from [url=http://xml.apache.org/]http://xml.apache.org/[/url] 2. You need to find out how you should structure your data storage. 3. You need to get your head around XSL/XSLT in order to transform your XML to HTML 4. To do this you need to really understand how the DOM works in XML 5. You need a good reference book more than anything else. I bought Osbournes "The Complete Reference XML" This book takes you through how XML shemas and DTD's work, info on XSL/XSLT, XLinks, XPointers, XTHML and bits on how to use CGI together with this. Reserve time for this and don't apply normal programming thoughts to it, that'll only make it harder (at least for me). And, hey, have fun ;) /Dan [url=http://www.dmsproject.com/] [img]http://www.dmsproject.com/gif/sig3.gif[/img] [/url] [url=http://faq.ozoneasylum.com/FaqWiki/shownode.php?sortby=rating&id=260]{cell 260}[/url] -{ a vibration is a movement that doesn't know which way to go }- Loading...
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