Getting started with XML
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Hello guys, I am about to self-teach myself some XML stuff. Till now, what I have seen in the MSDN mixed me up a little bit. It seems that to do anything interesting with MS Explorer and XML, you will have to use a lot scripting. I am not very interested in scripting (even though I know how to script in vbscript and jscript). Is scripting always necessary to use when using XML in IE? Or could a good combination of XML and HTML do the trick? Jeremy. "Hey man, Taliban, Tali me Banana."
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Hello guys, I am about to self-teach myself some XML stuff. Till now, what I have seen in the MSDN mixed me up a little bit. It seems that to do anything interesting with MS Explorer and XML, you will have to use a lot scripting. I am not very interested in scripting (even though I know how to script in vbscript and jscript). Is scripting always necessary to use when using XML in IE? Or could a good combination of XML and HTML do the trick? Jeremy. "Hey man, Taliban, Tali me Banana."
no Xml has its own transform language, XSL, which can be used to do very interesting things. It can transform XML in one format to another format (for example to tom) You can also use this to output HTML, raw text, CSS, ASP scripts, source code, and more. For example, I have an XSL file i built which transforms Winamp 3 playlists to M3U playlists very quickly. I have another which presents the playlist as an HTML page for viewing. If another media player used XML for playlists but had a totally different node structure, I could port my playlist from Winamp to that program by simply writing a quick XSL doc. Or if i wanted to write a program in C++ with all my music files as constant strings (for performance ;) ), I could write an XSL doc to quickly transform it into a compilable .CPP file. There is a lot more, but thats a good start loc.
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Hello guys, I am about to self-teach myself some XML stuff. Till now, what I have seen in the MSDN mixed me up a little bit. It seems that to do anything interesting with MS Explorer and XML, you will have to use a lot scripting. I am not very interested in scripting (even though I know how to script in vbscript and jscript). Is scripting always necessary to use when using XML in IE? Or could a good combination of XML and HTML do the trick? Jeremy. "Hey man, Taliban, Tali me Banana."
Scripting is necessary if you want to use the DOM to process XML. If you don't want to do that, you can use XSLT. XSLT is pretty cool, but it is quite challenging to master. You can take a look at 2 XSLT articles I wrote (while I was still using the name MarSCoZa).
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Hello guys, I am about to self-teach myself some XML stuff. Till now, what I have seen in the MSDN mixed me up a little bit. It seems that to do anything interesting with MS Explorer and XML, you will have to use a lot scripting. I am not very interested in scripting (even though I know how to script in vbscript and jscript). Is scripting always necessary to use when using XML in IE? Or could a good combination of XML and HTML do the trick? Jeremy. "Hey man, Taliban, Tali me Banana."
One option is to use th DSO (Data Source Object) and a tiny bit of scripting (2-3 lines) to bind a control like a lisst box to an XML data source. Other than that, you can combine your XML with XSL to get IE to render an HTML-like document. Erik Westermann Author, Learn XML In A Weekend (Summer 2002)
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Hello guys, I am about to self-teach myself some XML stuff. Till now, what I have seen in the MSDN mixed me up a little bit. It seems that to do anything interesting with MS Explorer and XML, you will have to use a lot scripting. I am not very interested in scripting (even though I know how to script in vbscript and jscript). Is scripting always necessary to use when using XML in IE? Or could a good combination of XML and HTML do the trick? Jeremy. "Hey man, Taliban, Tali me Banana."
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Hello guys, I am about to self-teach myself some XML stuff. Till now, what I have seen in the MSDN mixed me up a little bit. It seems that to do anything interesting with MS Explorer and XML, you will have to use a lot scripting. I am not very interested in scripting (even though I know how to script in vbscript and jscript). Is scripting always necessary to use when using XML in IE? Or could a good combination of XML and HTML do the trick? Jeremy. "Hey man, Taliban, Tali me Banana."
Check out an article about CMarkupArchive by Jonathan de Halleux. I use it in my apps.
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no Xml has its own transform language, XSL, which can be used to do very interesting things. It can transform XML in one format to another format (for example to tom) You can also use this to output HTML, raw text, CSS, ASP scripts, source code, and more. For example, I have an XSL file i built which transforms Winamp 3 playlists to M3U playlists very quickly. I have another which presents the playlist as an HTML page for viewing. If another media player used XML for playlists but had a totally different node structure, I could port my playlist from Winamp to that program by simply writing a quick XSL doc. Or if i wanted to write a program in C++ with all my music files as constant strings (for performance ;) ), I could write an XSL doc to quickly transform it into a compilable .CPP file. There is a lot more, but thats a good start loc.
Christopher, I'm looking to do a conversion from Windows Media playlists (.asx, etc.), which is in an xml format, to Winamp .pls for use in the Turtle Beach AudioTron file player I just bought (extremely cool gizmo, by the way). I haven't done anything with xml/xsl yet, but your description of the xsl transform language sounds perfect. Could you point me to some documentation on this feature? I'm not looking to really learn xml in full just yet, I merely have a single problem I need to solve as simply & quickly as I can make it. Thanks! Chistopher Duncan Author - The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World (Apress)
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Christopher, I'm looking to do a conversion from Windows Media playlists (.asx, etc.), which is in an xml format, to Winamp .pls for use in the Turtle Beach AudioTron file player I just bought (extremely cool gizmo, by the way). I haven't done anything with xml/xsl yet, but your description of the xsl transform language sounds perfect. Could you point me to some documentation on this feature? I'm not looking to really learn xml in full just yet, I merely have a single problem I need to solve as simply & quickly as I can make it. Thanks! Chistopher Duncan Author - The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World (Apress)
XSL is mainly for changing XML dialects (XHTML included). In order to transform to non-xml files, like M3U or TXT, you have to either craft your transform very carefully (many formats will not work because they may use tags which conflict) or use something like FOP (http://xml.apache.org/fop/index.html) You'll also have to watch out for whitespace, since most plain-text formats are very picky. Many xsl engines let you use absolute whitespace.
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XSL is mainly for changing XML dialects (XHTML included). In order to transform to non-xml files, like M3U or TXT, you have to either craft your transform very carefully (many formats will not work because they may use tags which conflict) or use something like FOP (http://xml.apache.org/fop/index.html) You'll also have to watch out for whitespace, since most plain-text formats are very picky. Many xsl engines let you use absolute whitespace.
Thanks, Christopher. Looks like the quick & dirty way is just a fast MFC dialog based app and a little string processing. Appreciate the link! Chistopher Duncan Author - The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World (Apress)