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NEW PRODUCTS
XML-ENABLED TOOLS
Lisa Rein, http://www.netuning.com/
Send announcements to:10662 Los Vaqueros Circle, Los Alamitos, CA 90720 [email protected]
We are all optimistic about the potential of the Web as a tool for knowledge management. We envision a universal database composed of millions of disparate object libraries, residing on locally hosted machines but nonetheless fully accessible from any remote location. We envision database-driven publishing becoming a reality, with the Web serving as the interface to a huge, distributed meta-database. While the database is already in place, retrieval mechanisms are still primitive. XML-enabled tools will begin to give us the power to access and benefit from the information stored on the Web in much richer ways than ever before.
One reason why is that XML allows authors, content providers, industries, and groups to design their own domain-specific tag sets. While XML syntax on its own does not convey meaning about the data contained within its tags, Resource Description Framework (RDF) will soon be used to provide an underlying semantic structure for XML documents. XML tags can then be coupled with an inferencing engine, providing customized accessibility to applications.
An XML-based Web site must have rules that describe how and under what conditions the data contained in its documents will be structured and processed. The unique thing about XML is that it allows us to dene these rules by ourselves. The data structure can be dened via either a Document Type Denition or a Schema, which must be written in either SGML or XML. However, since
XML is platform-, application-, language-, and domain-neutral, the business logic rules that dictate how to process that data can be written in the language of your choice.
For the data contained in an XML document to be parsed correctly, its markup must be well-formed, meaning that properly nested and nonabbreviated starting and ending tags are used. This well-formedness provides the encapsulation mechanism allowing designated sections of the data to be accessed programmatically. It is important to remember that XML is a markup language, not a programming language. For XML documents to be useful, you must pair them up with a scripting or programming language.
To visually render the data contained in an XML document within a browser, either a stylesheet...