The XML family of technologies will revolutionize web linking etc.

[kgun]

The XML family of technologies will revolutionize web linking and the way you present content on the web.

To fully understand the potential of the XML family of technologies you should have a basic understanding of

• Mathematical set theory.
• Data structures, especially data trees, nodestructures, containers and iterators on these containers.
• Programming languages especially tree and stream based parsers.

An understanding at the high school / undergraduate level should be enough. Note that the X in AJAX stands for XML, so XML is also important for developing web applications and is already an important element in Web Services. In addition, if you want to develop Web Applications based on XML, you should have a basic understanding of object oriented programming. But you can make great sites by only using the pure XML technologies like XPath, XPointer, XLink, XMLSchema, XSL(T) etc. Regarding XSL there is some misunderstanding. I can not say it better than one expert that is also an insider, Robert Richards (2006) "Pro PHP, XML and Web Services". Apress ISBN 1-59059-633-1 page 341 in my paper edition:

"The term XSL is often misunderstood, because many people think it is the same as XSLT, which this chapter is about, but in fact XSLT is a subset of XSL.

You can find more information about XSLT at http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt. It is a language written in XML that can transform an XML document into another XML document. For example, you can use XSLT to take some XML data and, using a style sheet, transform it into other output, such as XHTML or WAP using XSL."

You can use a well structured XML driven site to make a content management system without using a database. Pure XML is an extensible markup languge, exstensible in the respect that you can make your own language. XSL is a simple language that can make conditional expressions, counting, sorting, looping etc and it is exstensible like EXSLT. So if you have a basic background in HTML tagging, the next step should be learning XML and its family of related technologies. I say to my daughter. You shall go ahead and learn XML from the very start. Why learn the bad dialect of HTML? When you have learned XML, you have also learned HTML and in addition, you have learned to write well-formed documents. So without learning a programming / scripting language like PHP and a SQL database language, you can make great web pages. If you are new to web developement, I would reccomed the following.

• Learn the XML familiy of technologies thoroughly and
• then go on to the next level and learn a client side language like JavaScript and a serverside language like PHP. You need that to make serious AJAX applications based on the new XMLHttpRequest Object. But note, that for SEO and borwser purposes there is an alternative technology.
• Then if your needs grow, you may need a database.

But note, a well structured XML site will be spidered and indexed. Data in a database that is not pulled out and presented on the web will not be indexed. So there is also a SEO argument for using a pure XML driven site, that can be very important. XML documents can be spidered and indexed. Future SE Bots will be more advanced and like web browsers, they may get search options to transform XML data when pulled from the index of the SE. In addition XML data are ready for syndication, since you only need to transform them to another format like RSS by using XSLT and this XSLT stylesheet may be generated automatically (6th post in that link).

Last but not least, the traditional linking model of the web is with the introduction of XLinnk in a sense outdated. XLink opens the door for much richer, dynamic and creative linking shcemes. I leave it to you to read more about this important subject in the following papers:

• XML Linking Language.
• Improving Web linking using XLink.

Note:
By writing this post, that I should have written on my own forum, WPW is now as the first forum on the internet on the red carpet. That means that, I personally, regard this subject as very important, as does, as far as I understand, the iEntry management.

[kgun]

There is an important XML technology that you should be aware of, namely the Keyhole Markup Language (KML) that is used e.g. by Google to display data in an Earth browser, such as Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google Maps for mobile.

Related link and KW search:

GeoRSS

[kgun]

Related WPW link:

XML technology enabled browsers etc.

If you are interested in this you should definitely read the two or more related posts at ForumNorway. The following cite from one post may awake your appetite:

"This is transclusion. If the book that the above cite is taken from were an eBook, the URI would direct you directly to that book and highlight the cite, eg in yellow colour so it is clearly identified from the rest of the text. By combining this with XLink (see the XLink sticky post) it would be possible to transclude cites from n-different sources where you could choose your links from a link menu that may vary with context.

The sky is the limit. It is up to the browser vendor's fantasy to decide what XML technologies that can be implemented in the browser. You may choose options from a menu, for example a menu named "XML technologies" with submenus like, "Document node tree", "Document link menu", "Document identifiers", "Document Locators", "Digital fingerprint's", "Generate XPointer" (that can contain further submenus), "Generate XQuery" etc. etc".