XML, XForms, XSL etc

a new era?

[ktwilight]

i'm seeing more and more about XML. so i went to w3schools and check it out. and to my surprise, it looks very good! then i learnt of XForms and XSL (in replacement for CSS maybe?)

i have just got into xhtml and css quite heavily, except for css-p. and how with this coming at me, it does seem like it's moving really fast! i won't pull back, and will definitely try 'em out for my personal site when the new design is up. :D

so, what's your take in this? will we be changing our sites to xml with xforms and xsl? or is xhtml and css will still be the standard for years to come?

[choster]

The key to XML is its flexibility: industries or organizations can establish their own standard tags for information exchange, and many languages can be defined within the framework. XML isn't a replacement per se for HTML, but a family of languages, one of which (XHTML) may repalce HTML. You're already using XML if you use XHTML, which is HTML modified to follow XML's rules.

XSL, similarly, is a complement rather than a replacement for CSS unless you have a custom browser reading your custom tags. You could say XSL is a way of "styling data" whereas CSS is for "styling documents." For instance, you'd use XSLT to "transform" (translate, convert) data in one XML language to another. But you can also use it as a template language to output HTML or WAP. Or you can use XSL-FO to generate output for fixed-size displays such as PDF printouts or eBooks.

Right now, delivering XML data and XSL stylesheets to browsers for transformation on the client side is somewhat impractical, since you're delivering two lengthy documents for processing locally and many people use older browsers which lack parsers. But some XML formats like Atom have client-side parsers, and XML is fairly common nowadays on the server side whenever data is being shared--
- many queries for data like weather conditions or stock quotes are handled via an XML syntax called SOAP
- you can generate HTML pages from XML and XSL on the server side
- content is syndicated across sites and organizations through RSS, NITF, and other standardized languages