Adobe® Dreamweaver® CS4 Bible

1099

X

ML, short for Extensible Markup Language, has quickly become a

powerful force on the Web and an important technology for Web

designers to master. XML enables designers to define the parts of

any document—from Web page to invoice—in terms of how those parts are

used. When a document is defined by its structure, rather than its appear-

ance, as it is with HTML, the same document can be read by a wide variety

of systems and put to use far more efficiently.

Dreamweaver includes Roundtrip XML as a complement to its Roundtrip

HTML core philosophy. Roundtrip HTML ensures that the defined tags of

HTML remain just as you’ve written them. With XML, no one defined set

of tags exists—XML tags can be written for an industry, a company, or just

a Web site. Roundtrip XML permits Web designers to export and import

XML pages based on their own structures.

You can find XML all throughout Dreamweaver, just under the hood. The

Design Notes feature is based on XML, as is the completely customizable

menu system and even the HTML Styles feature. The Third-party Tags file

is pure XML and can describe any kind of tag. In fact, you can use XML to

describe most anything, even HTML. This chapter explores the basics of

XML, as well as the implementation of Roundtrip XML in Dreamweaver.

You’ll also find techniques for presenting XML data in a Web page using

Extensible Style Sheet Transformation (XSLT) t ...