subject: The Benefits & Disadvantages Of Employing Xml With Dom, Asp & Xsl [print this page] XML is a mark-up language which had been conceived actually as way of move and present data separately of any software or platform, its underpinning purpose was to allow for richly structured documents to be presented on the internet in a absolutely consistent fashion, whatever the web browser used or even the browser version. Even so even now developers continue to debate the benefits of XML above HTML and also whether we need XML at all.
But concerns aside, XML is much more powerful than HTML for the reason that its much more versatile, HTML gives, and indeed predefines, rigid tags for your data, for instance title ought to be contained inside the title tag, body elements ought to be enclosed within the body tag and so on.
XML on the other hand will allow you to design your own tags because it only specifies the standards with which you can define your tags, therefore you make use of any description you want to label your tags or containers and you may define an endless selection of languages based on the standards that will be defined by XML, and so XML is a lot more like a meta-mark-up language.
Strengths Of XML
XML contains a selection of main advantages, the most prominent as well as evident of which incorporate;
You are totally free to utilize your own mark-up elements or tags and can even mark-up tags on the fly which earlier did not exist.
XML provides much superior and considerably richer features for browser presentation and performance.
XML provides outstanding compression qualities that are way superior than HTML or standard text which gives XML a overall performance edge in data streaming.
XML data is a lot more vibrant and rich mainly because of the superior hypertext linking abilities of XML versus HTML.
Weaknesses of XML
As well as its advantages, XML also has a variety of deficiencies, the most notable and apparent of which include;
XML has the ability to be incredibly large and complicated, which unfortunately is why in some areas such as web services, JSON has become known as the favored choice.
XML is not yet wholly developed to enable total versatility in performing any programming task, in terms of full standards conformity. XSL and XSLT are a step in the proper track however they also are a long way from being in a perfect state.
XML Hypertext Transfer Protocol (XML-HTTP) issues still exist.
All round XML is a a lot more evolved way of working with data, nevertheless if you will be going to be developing XML based web apps it is critical to fully grasp the restrictions and demands that could possibly influence the functioning of any XML server.
For instance the kind of data, the ratio of tags to text, attributes to elements and also even the amount of waste white space can all affect on the capabilities of any XML server.
One other great thing with XML is the introduction of DOM, thanks to Microsoft, DOM stands for for Document Object Model and is a must have tool for loading and parsing XML files. DOM is a fantastic way to navigate your files, to gather information and to change those files.
Its moreover a excellent technique to work with your XML files and in particular is best for producing and exhibiting XML documents using code such as ASP and Visual Basic, you could also utilize XML VB tools such as MSMXL and Liquid XML Visual Basic to aid in parse, edit and create your VB code from your XML.
