[thelist] Beginner Question on XML plus Content Management challenge

[Martin]

nate koechley wrote on 25/7/01 7:20 pm

>> I'm curious as to what exactly the difference is 
>>between XML and HTML? I looked at the code on 
>>dante's form and most of it looked like HTML to me. 
>>Anyone care to tackle giving me a definition and 
>>sample of some of these terms?
>
>If the XML is done right, you _will_ just see HTML in 
>the browser, becuase it gets rendered/transformed 
>into HTML. Much like php, or cf, or something. 

Although this could conceivably be done by the client
(ie5 can render xml with xsl). I was looking at a site
at work today (url on the work machine sorry) which
was all XML.

The main difference is that XML is structured data -
you describe both the data and its structure, then use
XSL to define its presentation.

The problem comes when some of your content isn't
really structured. Most web pages of content (as opposed
to functionality like a shopping cart) are fairly unstructured -
you can't describe the content beyond 'headers', 'lists' and
'body paragraph', which doesn't tell you a lot about the content in 
question.

Compare this to a shopping cart product page, where you
may have 'product name', 'product description', 'product
features' etc etc, which may be presented as headers, 
body paragraphs and lists.

This is a key challenge of content management - to make life
easy for your CM System, all content should be structured. But that
leaves you with very little flexibility within your pages.

Think for a moment about the evolt site. In each article, some
of the data is structured - title, synopsis, category, author etc.
There is one db field for each bit of content which the site's
CMS uses to build the site pages. But the main article body
is very unstructured. If you couldn't add any HTML to it, you
wouldn't have the kind of flexibility required to produce the
range of articles we have.

Strict XML shouldn't have any markup like this - it should
all be prestructured.

Cheers
Martin

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