December 1999
Beginner
416 pages
9h 41m
English
Content preview from Active Server Pages 3.0 from Scratch
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The Next Big Thing: eXtensible Markup Language
Earlier we discussed Custom Style Sheets and how they enabled the developer set the appearance of specific tags, freeing us up to use the proper structural HTML instead of jury-rigging for appearance's sake.
Extensible Markup Language (XML) takes this one step farther. In XML, everything is described by generic structure tags, and the browser uses an eXtensible Style Sheet (XSL) to determine their appearance. This is still an emerging standard, however, and the existence and level of sophistication of this XML parser varies wildly from browser to browser.
If XML were only being used for displaying text, we might not even mention it here. Instead, it has a more important use as a way of storing data ...