XML is fairly simple. There are two basic forms for tags (with the key value pairs for attributes being optional): <tag key="value">info</tag> <br />
It's designed to be easy to parse. It's basicially a file that stores information by keys and values instead of hardcoding the location it expects data to be in or the size it expects records or values to be. Everything else beyond the basic formats above is someone's specific syntax. For instance, XHTML uses specific keywords and one of the two above forms for them. Other specifications require other keywords. There are several microformats that use XML syntax. There are bibliographics formats using XML. Many databases offer a way to access data in XML format. Soap protocols use XML. >I'm also getting the impression from other reading that XHTML (and perhaps >XML?) are now being >superseded by HTML5. True or not? For web pages, HTML5 is now popular in place of XHTML 1. However, the W3C still uses XHTML for other projects. XML is used in many places where one needs to interchange data (or save and reload data such as with initialization files and settings), but JSON and JSONP are also becoming popular for interchange of data. Also, HTML5 was written such that you can use could still use XML syntax (just like XHTML). That means a standard XML parser could still parse code that follows that syntax. Unlike XHTML, you do not have to use XML specific syntax. You can use syntax similar to HTML 4 or previous versions. For instance, <br> for a line break is valid as well as <br />. As to tools for writing/editing XML code, I use SciTE. It can highlight or color different parts of the code so you can more easily see if you've forgotten a quote or something similar. You can view XML in IE. If there are any syntax issues, it will typically note them. Microsoft also has some free XML editors at their site. I like xmlstarlet ( http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net/overview.php ) for manipulating XML. It's fairly easy to parse XML using AJAX functionality in JavaScript (including server side JavaScript for local scripting) or TinyXML-2 for C/C++ programs ( http://www.grinninglizard.com/tinyxml2/ ). It's good to understand the basics of XML such as the knowing the syntax and why it would be easy for a parser to evaluate that format. However, if you want to learn specific formats such as XHTML, it's helpful to have a specific need to know them. If you're just learning XML for web design, then you may want to take a look at some HTML5 references. (As mentioned, you can still use XML syntax with HTML5.) AJAX might also be of interest. -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
