[XML] XML/XSLT

[Banana fanna fo fanna]

I'm not up on all the new XML stuff...but I've heard that XML and XSLT are going to replace XHTML and CSS. Can someone confirm this, and kind of describe them to me?

[Grok]

Yeh I'm the one who said that, and I found after more reading that it was not quite accurate.

HTML describes how to make data appear, but wasn't extensible, so W3 created XHTML, and you can guess what the X means.  Yes, XHTML is an extensible HTML.  Meanwhile, XML describes data.  Along comes XSL, which means Extensible Stylesheets Language, the markup for XML.

XSLT is extensible stylesheet language Transformations.  This is used to convert XML to anything.  Most commonly you convert XML to XML, but you can also convert XML to HTML, XML to XHTML, and so on.

You know SQL is structured query language for relational databases, and is used to select, update, insert, delete and manipulate sets of data.  Well, XSLT is called the "SQL for the web", meaning it is designed to perform similar operations on XML sets.  And in fact, it does a lovely job of that.

I'm still early in my studies of XSLT, but when I get a couple more weeks of practice, I'll show you some neatness of it all.

[CupHead]

Just as sort of a side note, there are all sorts of fun [standardized] other languages that you can apply to XML, like XPointers and XPath, w3c.org has a list of all of the things you can do that have been made into part of the XML standard.

[Banana fanna fo fanna]

So I can still confidently write my XHTML?