On Mon, May 10, 1999 at 08:10:32PM -0700, Amancio Hasty wrote:
> xls and xml are markup languages which means you need an
> "engine" to render -- they do solve very nicely the document
> construct , or grammar and syntax.
Not strictly true. Although given the all the misinformed press hype
about XML at the moment, I'm not surprised people are getting it wrong.
XML is not a markup language. It's a language for describing markup
languages that you want to create.
Suppose you want to create "Amancio's TV Listings Language", so that
fxtv (or something) can read files formatted as ATLL and let you choose what
you want to watch.
You would write the definition for ATLL in XML. Assuming that fxtv then
had an XML parser embedded in it, fxtv could read in files formatted
in ATLL (in the same way that a web browser can read in files formatted
in HTML) and then do something useful with them.
Your XML aware web browser could then also read in these ATLL files and
do something useful with them too, *without you needing to convert them
to HTML first*. This is where the XML Style Language (XSL) comes in.
XML is really SGML-lite. Most of chapter 3 of
http://www.freebsd.org/tutorials/docproj-primer/
is accurate for XML as well.
N
--
There's some milk in the fridge about to go off. . . and there it goes.
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