use of XML
Out of context: Reply #13
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- monNom0
it's kind of a write once, read anywhere sort of thing...
Suppose you want to be able to keep an archive of data, be it stories or stock data or whatever, stick that data into XML files, then using XSLT, or a sever side script, you can spit it out in any way you want... send it out to flash, send it out as a PDF document, send it out as a website... make your website look entirely different and and all your data is independant of the styling and layout (similar to linked CSS files, they make things easy to update)... there's a million and one uses for it...some better than others (I think flash remoting is probably way bettter for transfering data to flash than XML is... XML takes FOREVER!)
sorry, I'm digressing... it just makes updates REALLY easy... if a client wants to go to flash, from html, you just need to build the flash file to read that data and display it... if the client wants to go back to HTML, you don't have to use legacy data, or pull it back out of flash... you just use the same XML and spit it out differently with an updated XSLT file(or files)...
it seems like really handy stuff... for some purposes... I don't think it really makes sense for a portfolio site, or a blog, but it definitely makes sense for large scale, content rich sites which might have a custom CMS system built for them.
does anybody know of a quality XML based CMS system for cheap?
that's the only problem I see with it.. in order to update XML, you need to get nitty gritty with it, and because it's seperate from the style, it's hard to look at for those not code-inclined.