XML? Why?

Anon

I've been looking round at articles and examples using xml recently, trying to understand what all the fuss is about, but I'm just more confused!

All that I see, is xml files, with their own tags, and then having a php script replace <title> with <font size=4> etc. and </title> with </font>.

I've been using tags like [TITLE] in my pages for a while now, and just using str_replace, no xml objects, and no xml files. What's wrong with this? Can XML really not do anything for me?

sangamon

Danny,

XML is so much more useful that what you're looking at. Check out RDF / CDF files, for example. These are proper XML files, and
with the correct script, are very easy to process with PHP.

I receive various newsfeeds in XML as well as RDF and CDF. The XML parsing engine lets me extract what information I need from them,
and display it on a page.

XML /RDF/RSS/CDF feeds are quite common these days. Putting them on a site is very rewarding, and you might get more hits for it 😉

XML has other uses. I beleive that AbiWord and Gnumeric use XML to save it's pages.

And if you want to display these on a webpage? Just write your own filter for them!

That's the power of XML: Inter-operability!

I hope this answers a few of your questions.

Regards,

Mark.

Anon

thanx for th info

Anon

I noticed slashdot have one to load news headlines from their site, so I guess it's an easy way for multiple sites (or even pages) to load the same data, but display it (or different parts of it) in different ways?

Ok, that's a bit better. But is it any better for a single news page, than say, storing it as:

$title[0] = "Microsoft go bust";
$story[0] = <<<EOD
STRODY HERE
EOD;
$link[0] = "http://somelink.com";

$title[1] = "Other title";
$story[1] = <<<EOD
STRODY HERE
EOD;
$link[1] = "http://somelink.com";

Anon

there's a book by Prentice hall , i think that would answer yr queries.

sangamon

I noticed slashdot have one to load news >headlines from their site, so I guess it's >an easy way for multiple sites (or even >pages) to load the same data, but display >it (or different parts of it) in different >ways?

That's correct. Or they can simply display it the same. It's easier than grabbing a snippet of HTML from a remote server.

Ok, that's a bit better. But is it any >better for a single news page, than say, >storing it as:

[snip code]

Do you want your news exported to other sites? If the answer is yes, I'd go for an RSS feed. If no, then I'd carry on doing what you are.

Just a side note: All my XML parsing produces an array pretty much like what you've got now 😉

Regards,

Mark.

Anon

I just downloaded something from phpxml.com or something (.org? dunno), and I was looking at the Government example, and I noticed the search box only had one line of code in the source! Cool!

So I looked about, and it turns out it uses this XPath stuff, which allows queries and stuff. Cool!

I'm just looking it up at w3c.org/TR/xpath.

The think I downloaded looks really neat, might save me a lot of time!

I run a multi-webmaster website, and the others barely even know html, so XML would be great, they'd be able to understand it, and I can put the content into the page!

I think the main reason I was confused was cos I was looking at it as an alterantive to html (cos they're compared so much), thinking it was a way of displaying data, but it's more a way of storing it, and you can display it how you want.

Thanks for your help!

Danny

tinuviel

I am using this program from phpxml.org that has functions for adding, editing, searching, and deleting nodes in an xml document. But I need to add the nodes in alphabetical order..OR..when I want to display the nodes to an html page I sort them THEN using php somehow. Does anyone know how to sort xml data? Thanks!