XML: Does anyone here know how to use it well? Need some assistance on web developing
As some of you might know, I'm working on a language self-study website (one day, I shall finish that guide to electronic music as well, but I can't do it all at once ). As I'm first focusing my work on Japanese, I'm gonna need to have a few more databases than usual (for ideograms 1, words, grammatical rules and whatnot) and that's where my dilemma begins.
Since I'd like to focus my time on the languages rather than on the web design/devoloping, I wasn't looking forward to learning complicated ways of storing files and retrieving data. When I found out how simple XML 2 is, I decided to give it a go. However, combining XML and XSL seems not to be a good idea, because as far as I understood, I'd need to have a different database for every different HTML file, as the Data Islands 3 thingy seems to work in a different way in every single browser (am I doing something wrong?). Can't I use XML databases for several pages without having problems with browsers? What other simple solutions are there? I really was trying to avoid the infamous PHP + MySQL, for example, because I'd rather use something similar to what I know (XHTML, CSS and a little Flash, basically ). Is there any way out? 1 In order to work with ideograms, I'd need something that supports unicode or a less usual character encoding. 2 XML stands for EXtensible Markup Language. If you want more info, click here. 3Here is the code I'm using. If there's anything wrong, they're to blame
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Dec-15-2004 15:55
born2trance
_i_am_trance_
Registered: Dec 2003
Location: indianapolis, indiana
yeah whats the deal with RSS? i know xml and RSS kinda "affiliated"
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Dec-15-2004 16:05
Lira
Ancient BassAddict
Registered: Nov 2001
Location: Brasília, Brazil
quote:
Originally posted by born2trance
yeah whats the deal with RSS? i know xml and RSS kinda "affiliated"
quote:
What is RSS?
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a lightweight XML format designed for sharing headlines and other Web content. Think of it as a distributable "What's New" for your site. Originated by UserLand in 1997 and subsequently used by Netscape to fill channels for Netcenter, RSS has evolved into a popular means of sharing content between sites (including the BBC, CNET, CNN, Disney, Forbes, Motley Fool, Wired, Red Herring, Salon, Slashdot, ZDNet, and more). RSS solves myriad problems webmasters commonly face, such as increasing traffic, and gathering and distributing news. RSS can also be the basis for additional content distribution services.
RSS Syntax
RSS defines an XML grammar (a set of HTML-like tags) for sharing news. Each RSS text file contains both static information about your site, plus dynamic information about your new stories, all surrounded by matching start and end tags.
Each story is defined by an tag, which contains a headline TITLE, URL, and DESCRIPTION. Here's an example:
... RSS Resources http://www.webreference.com/authori...guages/xml/rss/ Defined in XML, the Rich Site Summary (RSS) format has
quietly become a dominant format for distributing headlines on the Web.
Our list of links gives you the tools, tips and tutorials you need to get
started using RSS. 0323
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Dec-15-2004 16:27
EarnYourKeep
LIT
Registered: Dec 2001
Location: twentyonetwo
i use RSS to build ONIX at work
XML basics - data wrapped with tagged text (html style)
RSS - think of it as a streamline of HTML. It's a way to build say "top stories" each day and simply feeding it to your web site without having to alter the XML/HTML similar to the functions of php/asp without the gui or web forms. although RSS/XML offers less control than php/asp.
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Dec-15-2004 17:02
Lira
Ancient BassAddict
Registered: Nov 2001
Location: Brasília, Brazil
No one else works with XML?
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Dec-16-2004 14:10
jdat
Jay Van Dat
Registered: Oct 2001
Location: I dont even know
quote:
Originally posted by Lira No one else works with XML?
I use an XML RSS feed on my website to disply news. I use zfeeder, a free php script available by searching. Very easy to use. I just used a CSS sytle sheet to modify how I wanted the info displayed.
I've used XML before in some stuff for work -- the simplicity of the formatting/structure makes it extremely easy to parse. I'll be using it very very soon to feed data into a Flash application.
Anyway.. I'm not sure exactly how you want to use this data on a page, but reading through your post several things come to mind. (I'm just going on what you've written so please fill me in on the details if I get any of this wrong.)
If I remember correctly Japanese has a bajillion ideograms. Are you absolutely sure you want to use flat XML files to store ideograms and words? Without doing any server-side processing, that's going to be a huge load for the client-side to handle, and will potentially be a pain for you to manage.
However, if you were to do some server-side processing (such as with PHP), loading XML files with that many tags will place a considerable load on the server. I really think you could benefit greatly by using some sort of database (MySQL, Postgres, ...) to store this stuff. That would solve a huge portion of any potential performance issues, make paging much easier, and would alleviate the browser compatibility headaches you mentioned as well.
There's also the possibility of feeding MySQL (or whatever) data into a dynamic XML file by way of PHP or something. I've done a good deal of dynamic XML stuff at work, worked nicely.
And holy shit, I vote your post as the most well-formatted post evar!
). As I'm first focusing my work on Japanese, I'm gonna need to have a few more databases than usual (for ideograms 
). Is there any way out? 
