XML

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 2241

Posted by sub
2004-10-13 05:21:45

The essence of it: HTML is a formatting language, i.e. it specifies _How_ information will be presented. XML specifies _What_ that information is, i.e. is a specific item the name of a person, his e-mail or just simple long-winded text?

Ideally, what all this means is that one can actually “explain” to an XML-aware application what the information represents and it will process it accordingly. This is the basis of web Content Management Systems like the one this discussion list is based on.

Office 2003 is based on XML. Therefore, with the aid of an XML editing tool like Infopath, one can create forms that will directly translate data to HTML for presentation and vice versa: a webshop page can be directly linked to an inventory made in Excel; then a web order form can be directly linked to an Access order database, as well as to a Word document that will be e-mailed as the order confirmation.

In addition, if an application can save its data in XML rather than some native format, one can rest assured that it will be usable even if the original application is made redundant.

alx

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