XML Strengths and Weaknesses with DOM, ASP and XSL
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Since the inception of XML, many developers have wondered why they need XML and how they can use XML to their benefit. In this article Nakul looks at some of the terminology that comes with using XML and its related technologies, as well as how to create and transform XML documents with ASP and XSL using Microsoft's MSXML parser.Since the inception of XML, many developers have wondered why we need XML... How is it better than HTML and what does it do? For starters, XML is far more powerful than HTML, and the power resides in the "X" in XML (which stands for extensible). Rather than providing a set of pre-defined tags (as in the case of HTML), XML specifies the standards with which you can define your own markup languages with their own sets of tags. XML is therefore a meta-markup language, allowing you to define an infinite number of markup languages based upon the standards defined by XML.
XML was created so that richly structured documents could be used over the web. The only viable alternatives, HTML and SGML, are not practical for this purpose. XML allows you to define all sorts of tags with all sorts of rules, such as tags representing business rules or tags representing data description or data relationships.
In this article we're going to take a look at some of the terminology that comes with using XML and its related technologies, as well as how to create and transform XML documents with XSL using Microsoft's MSXML parser. To test the code samples shown in this article you should be running Windows NT/2000/XP with IIS installed. You should also have SQL server 2000 installed on the same machine.
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