> well Im out of a job so I am sitting around learning XML. It seems like a
> great tool, but I am trying to figure out why I would actually use it?
If you intersting for my experience:
I find xml+xslt useful for offline-site generation tasks,
right now I am making site, and there are folders
content\
db\
pages\
xslt\
in 'db' I store 'pages.xml', 'news.xml' and 'common.xml'
f.e. 'pages.xml' - describe all pages of site:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<pages>
<page id="about">
<name>about</name>
<descr>more description</descr>
</page>
<page id="address">
<name>address</name>
<descr>more descritption</descr>
</page>
...
</pages>
where <name> are going to menu and to page header, <descr> - this is 'title'
for <a>,
'news.xml' - news of site:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<news>
<news-item>
<date>01.01.2003</date>
<text>opening site</text>
</news-item>
</news>
'common.xml' - common information about company (name, year, email, phones
...)
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="windows-1251"?>
<common>
<year>2003</year>
<name>Name of company</name>
<slogan>slogan</slogan>
<address>
<line>russia/ekaterinburg</line>
<line>street/building</line>
<line>phone</line>
<line>email</line>
</address>
<logo width="200" height="200" src="image.gif" title="title/>
</common>
directory 'pages' store each page as xml file,
f.e. 'about.xml':
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<page-content>
<p img="hands">
paragraph
</p>
</page-content>
then in folder 'xslt' are stored xslt files,
there is 'fp-page.xsl'
an 'site-page.xsl'
first - this is xslt-transformation for First Page (index.html)
second - this is xslt-transformation for any page of site.
my php script make next - for each page of site
make one xml file, as aggregation of
pages.xml + common.xml + {idPage}.xml
and with this one xml file make site-page.xsl transformation and then save
this as file {idPage}.html
script have template:
<?xml version="1.0">
<page-of-site>
#add_elements_here#
</page-of-site>
and on #add_elements_here# it are placed that xml files,
also script placed tag <pageId>{idPage}</pageId>
where {idPage} - are real page's id ('about', 'address' ...)
by this tag xsl can determine what page he show, and make menu bar with
selected item,
and take from "page-of-site/pages/page[@id = $idPage]/name" (this is XPath)
name of page, for placing description of page.
content may contains any tags, and in xsl there is handlers for them, f.e. I
have 'price.xml',
and I have specific tags for price-list, and price line:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<page-content>
<p>
<price-list>
<price file="file1.zip">Things1</price>
<price file="file2.zip">Things1</price>
</price-list>
</p>
</page-content>
and in site-page.xsl there is handler (tamplate in xslt term.) for this:
<xsl:template match="price-list" mode="content">
<table border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3">
<xsl:for-each select="price">
<tr>
<xsl:if test="position() mod 2 != 0">
<xsl:attribute name="bgcolor">#eeeeee</xsl:attribute>
</xsl:if>
<td><xsl:value-of select="."/></td>
<td><a href="{@file}" target="_blank"><xsl:value-of
select="@file"/></a></td>
</tr>
</xsl:for-each>
</table>
</xsl:template>
hope this helps :)
Ilya
ps: may be in future I make my this project open-source.
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