XML - wave of the future?

[h8ids]

Reading up on XML.
Browsers have come along way since 2000 and XML has a great deal of potential. But how does XML (along with XSL, XSLT, XSL-FO, XPath, XML-DOM, XQuery, XPointer and XLink (AJAX: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML,)) stack up against the use of just PHP / Javascript or Flash?

[Alex Vincent]

Well, XML alone isn't enough. Specific XML languages carry benefits which PHP, JavaScript and Flash alone can't deliver.

Case in point: SVG. It's XML, it's graphics, and for non-artists like me, it's relatively easy to create a decent graphic (http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/weirdal/archives/verbosio/verbosio-logo.svg) in about two hours.

PHP of course can generate SVG. It can also generate XHTML, RDF, or any other XML document.

It's also possible to have JavaScript inside a XML document:


<foo xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<html:script type="application/x-javascript">alert('Hello World')</html:script>
</foo>


XML is also useful for exchanging data. RSS feeds (used often in news and blog aggregators like http://planet.mozilla.org) are XML generated by a server-side application (often PHP), and read by another (also often PHP) to generate a composite page. RSS is a specific case of RDF+XML (often abbreviated as RDF).

HTH.

[h8ids]

Ahhhh, Thank you.

The right tool for certain jobs.