The Death of XHTML 2

This semester I am in a web programming class. We are going to learn XHTML. For now I assume that XHTML is HTML adhering to XML standards. A quick scan of my textbook seems to indicate you can just add three lines to your HTML document to make it an XHTL one. We shall see.

It was exciting to see XHTML in the news recently. Well it was exciting until I found that we are about to see the end of XHTML 2. The W3C has decided to pursue HTML 5 instead. I am not sure if this means XHTML in general is dead, or if it is specific to the XHTML 2 specification.

I have head that HTML 5 is not all that exciting. It is a means to combat the rise of competing technologies such as Silverlight and Flash. Apparently Internet Explorer is not supporting all of HTML 5 features. That's a bit of a concern, as I think IE still leads the browser market. Perhaps Microsoft wants to push Silverlight at the expense of their browser. I will check back later when I learn more XHTML in class.

WTF is XML

I often see message board posts asking what exactly XML is. The first Google link will take you to Wikipedia, where the acronym is translated as the Extensible Markup Language. It is defined as a set of rules for encoding documents. Sounds simple enough.

Here is the funny thing. I don't think they teach XML in college. Not even in computer science digress. If it was described in a class, it would be in the Web 2.0 class, which happens to not exist.

Some have called XML a complicated protocol. Others just call it a file type. An easy way of dealing with XML is to use tools to take care of the details. Actually I want to correct my initial statements. The very first link on Google search was a sponsored one by Altova. They were pushing their XML Spy program. I have used it before. Even though it is expensive, it makes XML easier to deal with.

But I digress. XML lets humans read file contents. The files themselves are ASCII text, which get sent over the Internet using the TCP/IP transmission protocol. I have written a whole blog about this subject. We plan to import XML files in our system at work next year. I wanted to purchase a copy of XMLSpy for use at work. However the price tag seems to have given my customer caution. The tool is not more expensive than some of the other software development tools they buy me. However XML is more specialized, and I am not sure I can justify the return on investment.

XML Dedication

Check out this picture for some serious XML dedication. Well it was actually some marketing. I'd call that good marketing. That at least deserves a link. Check out what the CEO of her company has to say about expensive disk storage.

In other news, I have signed up for a college class on XHTML. Now I assume that I am actually going to learn HTML. However the new sexy way to label such learning is XHTML. I paid an arm and a leg for the school textbooks for the course. Chapter 1 tells me XHTML is HTML with three extra lines added at the top of the file. LOL. I bet you can guess what they are talking about.

Be on the lookout for some posts on HTML as I study up in the class.

In Defense of XML

I read a Reddit post defending the creators of the XML standard. This was focused on XML basics. It excluded fringe technologies such as WS-*, SOAP, XML-RPC, and RDF. The author acknowledged that a big part of XML was related standards like XML Schema and XQuery. However he declared that the main point of XML was standardizing a file format and creating a meta language. The best part of the post was the many comments that were received.

First let’s cover the bad. SOAP requests take forever to parse. XML parsing in general seems to be inefficient. It is slow for large data transfer. Most developers do not like XML. This may be due to the APIs like SAX and DOM being horrible.

That is quite a list of bad comments. But each of them, there was a corresponding good comment. XML has been applied to many domains. It is good for large and complex documentation. It is also good for configuration files. Microsoft Visual Studio has a nice XML editor built in. XML is essentially SGML for the web. In other words, it is meant for data transfer.

Initially I thought I would be involved in a new addition to our system that will parse XML input data. However I am finding that I am too busy with other new parts to our system this year. So I have not been as active in my XML studies since my training class ended. It is still nice to read what people in the XML industry have to say about the topic.

Parsing the XML

Today our system receives input files from mainframe systems in custom format. However starting next year, we will be getting some files in XML format. Today the lead developer on that task shared some of the technology options to deal with reading the input data.

I liked some of the first options that were presented. Essentially they were using a high level language such as C or Java to work with the XML parser provided by Oracle Corporation. The destination of our data is a huge Oracle database.

One of the other options was to use XML DB to pull the XML right into our database as XML. Then we could use some code to further process the XML data from the database. This sounded good as we have a number of developers with Oracle PL/SQL coding talent.

A DBA on our project thought storing huge amounts of XML in our database would be painfully slow. Instead he recommended we transform the data using XSLT. The we could directly load the transformed data into our database with quick loading programs from Oracle. This was all good food for thought.

XML Notepad 2007

While reading an article on the best free tools for your PC, I spotted a product called XML Notepad 2007. This is a free download from Microsoft. I decided to give it a try. We are moving to an XML format for input files next year.

The download was not too large. What really impressed me was how fast the tool installed. Sure it is just a little XML tool. But these days even the simple tools seem to take forever to install. In contrast, once installed, the tool seemed to take a while to launch.

The “read me” file that came with the install said XML Notepad 2007 has been downloaded over one million times. I wonder whether that was the number of downloaded at the time when they released this version (v2.5). Or perhaps the application calls home to Microsoft to determine the current counts.

The application has a right pane which show information from your XML document. At first it seems sparse. But it fills up as you select items in the tree on the left hand pane. This application feels like a simple viewer. However it states that you can use it to create XML documents as well.

I found the tree like structure on the left hand pane useful for determining the structure of the XML in some test files. In other words I could see the hierarchy of parent and child relationships. Make no mistake. This product is no XMLSpy. But it will do until my company can purchase me an XMLSpy product.

XBRL

Altova has come out with MissionKit. This is a set of tools for XML, UML, and databases. In case you did not know, UML is the Unified Modeling Language.

I know Altova for their superior XMLSpy application for XML development. In fact, XMLSpy is a part of MissionKit. I am excited because they are purchasing some XMLSpy licenses on my project.

Altova added XBRL support to their tool kit. XBRL stands for the Extensible Business Reporting Language. It has tags for accounting purposes. This helps businesses exchange financial information. If their toolkit and XBRL support are anything like XMLSpy, I predict good things from it.