Plea for help: The detriment of using Microsoft products

[Niall Kavanagh]

On Mon, 15 May 2000, Jeffry Smith wrote:

> Actually, it would be more to say that HTML is a select subset of XML 
> (eXtensible Markup Language), which is itself a subset of SGML
> (Standard Generalized Markup Language).  SGML was developed as a Gov't 

HTML a subset of XML? I wish!! ;) XHTML is a subset, HTML is not unless
the author has taken great pains to ensure conformancy.

XML isn't exactly a subset of SGML either, more like a restricted form of
it. 

> the transform does not take place via XML.  XML is a markup
> language, XSL (Extensible Scripting Languguage) is a programming
> language designed to manipulate XML, and XML can be manipulated by
> other programming languages (perl::XML, Java XML parsers, etc).  
>

XSL actually stands for Extensible Style Language I believe. Taking your
description a bit further: XSL stylesheets are actually XML documents
themselves, making it even easier to work with them. You can also use
plain ol' CSS (cascading style sheets) to format XML-- this is infact how
Mozilla formats XML documents (since it doesn't support XSL, yet).
 
> Very "Unixy" in design & feel (lots of small tools doing one thing
> only, instead of one big thing).  It's not the Silver Bullet that some
> make it out to be (every new thing in SW is a silver bullet, yes?),
> but, because, if you have the DTDs, you know the structure, and the
> clean separation of structure, info, presentation, and manipulation,
> once you have a tool that reads DTDs and can apply transform rules, to
> manipulate another document written to another DTD, you just plug in
> the new DTD.
> 

Silver bullet? It's Java for the new millenium!! ;)

For those interested, more reading on xml.com, xmlhack.com, and
xmlsoftware.com. As Jeffrey said, it's no silver bullet, but it can make
your life a lot easier in certain situations.

--
Niall Kavanagh, niall at kst.com
News, articles, and resources for web professionals and developers:
http://www.kst.com

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