Hi,

I'm not sure how after so long I just start to decide using XML in my projects but I guess I am now because it seems a lot of scripts are using it. I really don't see the point of it though.. I've taken the tutorial at W3schools (I'll admit I did read a little to fast so i might have missed the whole point but..) on XML and still find it pointless. In a PHP application what are some uses of XML especially with template building like in IPBs' templates.
I know I didn't describe this very well. I'll come back and add a little more description soon.
Thanks!

If you're only working in one small corner of software development, a particular module of PHP, there probably isn't any reason to use XML.

But when you need to expose or consume web services, do cross-platform or cross-application integration, flexible user defined data stores, and really all kinds of other things, XML is invaluable.

RSS, ATOM, and xHTML are some nice implementations of XML that may justify it's use. Additionally backend b2b communications may come through in XML.

For myself, I rarely create XML files, but I frequently read them. XML files use up, IMO, way too much space for most of the programs I write and don't justify the extra structure especially given that PHP 4 sucks at working with XML (I've developed a number of ways around it out of necessity, but it still sucks.) Instead, I store stuff in the db or in configuration files which set PHP variables. This requires no additional time parsing and the data stored is the data needed, with not very much space wasted to structure (the whole point, afaik, of XML).

I totally agree with Jeremy.
But there is 1 occasion where I worked with xml+xsl, it's when I was given as a absolute must features that every pages of the site would be available as a PDF.

What I did, is that every datas where stored (in the db) as XML fragments.
I used php XSLT engine to apply stylesheets transformation to Xhtml for the regular display, and a second stylesheet to transform the xml via apache's .org xml-FO engine, which allows you to generate PDF from XML.

But it's really the only time I truly created XML with PHP...

If you ever do backend integrations between disparate systems XML is a beautiful thing lending human-readable and therefore understandable hierarchy to data structures.

Hi all,

Not sure if this right place but need some help on xml. I am trying to lean it from a book and have 2 question.

1 Would this be classed as the same thing.

<name> language="english">Tiger</name>

<name> language=&quot;english>Tiger</name>

2 What does <![CDATA[ ]]> do is this like a multyline comment ??

your syntax is wrong in both cases.

<name language="english">Tiger</name>

This would be the only valid syntax. XML is not HTML, you don't apply html entities to it, but you use html entities if you output HTML via a xsl transformation.

And a CDATA section is a section that will not be parsed by the XSL engine uppon transformation. It's raw text, that will be outputed as such.

Originally Posted by tripy

And a CDATA section is a section that will not be parsed by the XSL engine uppon transformation. It's raw text, that will be outputed as such.

Totally correct, I'd just add that CDATA indicates to all agents - XSL or otherwise to not parse the inner section as XML.

As a side question, what do you think about using attributes instead of sub-tags? That is

<name>
  <lang>en</lang>
  <value>Tiger</value>
</name>

as opposed to

<name lang="en">Tiger</name>

?

Originally Posted by tripy

your syntax is wrong in both cases.

<name language="english">Tiger</name>

This would be the only valid syntax. XML is not HTML, you don't apply html entities to it, but you use html entities if you output HTML via a xsl transformation.

And a CDATA section is a section that will not be parsed by the XSL engine uppon transformation. It's raw text, that will be outputed as such.

Ok

so could I do this

<name language="english">Tiger</name>
<name language=&quot;english>Tiger</name>

If not where would I use the special symbols like &lt; &gt; so on?

when you mean raw text does that mean if I used cdata it treats all lines between the tag as text So it will display as text. Where if I don't use CDATA it will not display the code but will display the other text.