Like many developers, I’ve been working with XML for many years now. My first XML-based program dates back to within 6 months of the publishing of the XML 1.0 Recommendation by W3C. I’ve already gone through the phases of: XML looks promising, XML is cool, everything in XML, and XML is just another tool XML… Read More »
I’ve been seeing a lot of comments in various forums similar to this comment by Christopher Diggins: XML down a slippery slope. In most of them, there is the implied belief that XML is the solution to all problems and that anything that violates the spirit of XML is to be condemned. I have personally… Read More »
XML Bible Elliotte Rusty Harold IDG Books, 1999 As computer books go, this book is old. However, it does a spectacular job of handling all of the nitty-gritty details of XML. I first stumbled across this book when it was new. The only really definitive information you could find on XML was the W3C recommendation… Read More »
XML in a Nutshell Elliotte Rusty Harold and W. Scott Means O’Reilly, 2001 This is a good overview of XML-based technologies as of 2001. If you are looking for a deep understanding of the uses of XML and related technologies, this is not the right book for you. However, if you are looking for a… Read More »
XML.com: Opening Open Formats with XSLT [Feb. 04, 2004] This article by Bob DuCharme is a great example of something we don’t see enough of. He takes data from a defined XML application (OpenOffice.org Impress format). He uses standard tools (XSLT) to extract and format data useful to him. This is not the normal If… Read More »
I had an interesting thought during an email conversation with a friend yesterday. One problem many people have when using XML for data is a misunderstanding of what the XML is. (If you don’t believe in the data in XML approach, feel free to ignore me.<grin/>) It’s easy to make the mistake of treating the… Read More »
Although the debate continues to rage between the XML as documents camp and the XML as data camp, it seems reasonable to believe that both styles are here to stay. I have noticed one trend in XML data that strikes me as déjà vu all over again. There seem to be a large number of… Read More »
In most of the SVG I’ve seen people either prefer to use the style attribute or set the individual style attributes. I don’t see much use of CSS classes and I wonder why. Most of the criticisms I’ve seen of the use of CSS fall into four categories: It’s not XML. It’s too verbose to… Read More »