Creating Web Sites Bible, Third Edition

Chapter 16. Designing with XML

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Designing with XML

• Schemas

• XML Web sites

Web sites today must not only be prepared for rapidly changing content, they also must be prepared for rapidly changing technology. It has been true since the mid-1990s that a site must leverage HTML and JavaScript in its construction. More recently, HTML 4.01 with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), scripts, and so on, has become the standard for coding components of your typical Web site. Most recently, the technologies required for building a site range from HTML 4.01 to Wireless Markup Language (WML) to Extensible Markup Language (XML) to XHTML to the dozens of XML-based languages/vocabularies. The new languages are necessitated because of the massive deluge of Internet appliances.

Designing with XML

A new era is dawning. The always evolving Web browser is undergoing another major metamorphosis. The lingua franca of the Web is now proclaimed to be XML.

The truth is that XML is an effort to simplify, systematize, and rationalize Web authoring through a set of easy-to-learn and easy-to-use markup commands. The new features are an effort to accommodate the changing face of the Web itself. HTML has always been designed as a markup language. By that we mean that HTML is concerned with providing a document with its structure. The content could be anything. There was no concern with being able to describe the content.

However, as the Internet evolved, the World Wide Web became not only a display medium but also ...