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Microsoft Visual Basic .NET Tutorials
.NET and XML / What is XML?
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Subtitles of the Movie (Microsoft Visual Basic .NET / .NET and XML / What is XML?)
Every few years a new technology comes along, and these things gets touted as this is the end-all deal. This is going to change the way we eat, sleep and think and all that sort of thing. It is going to change the way we rotate the tires on our car, and somehow they never quite do that. They me have some kind of good things but they never really quite do that. And there are number of things come to mind, and I am not going to start listing them, you know what they are. But XML is one of those things that is actually delivering on that. I tell my classes all the time when I do my live training classes, I tell my students you know if XML has so captured the attention of the industry, that if you put the CEO's of all the different technology companies in a room together, most of them would after about five minutes be filing law suits against each other for various reasons. But if you put them in there and tell them to talk about XML, you'd see them do a group hug, sing a song together and all kind of stuff. Everybody is jumping on to XML, and let me just show you real quickly, real simply what XML is if you are not exactly familiar with it now. Of course, I am assuming that you know HTML here. But if I show you this data in HTML, there is nothing that you can really infer from this data except that: in a browser 87634 is going to be, thanks to these tags,
87634. This is going to be larger than this is. So we are going to have large 87634 and then a smaller 46.43. Now the only thing that gives these numbers any relevant meaning, is to know exactly either how I queried them, where I got them, or how I came across these numbers; and this is where XML comes to the rescue. I am going to take the same data and I am going to show it to you now in XML. And notice 87634 is a part number, and 46.43 is the price of that. Now how does this help us? Well now, even after we've pulled the data from a data store somewhere, we don't have to go back to that data store to get the meaning of the data should we need to make an additional query or get more information from our data. So XML first of all self-describes the data, it maintains the meaning of the data and it allows us to go back to that piece of data that we extracted and find more information out, and that is basically XML. Now the next cool thing about XML, is this stuff gets transported via TCP/IP over port 80 in a streaming fashion. Now we can pass this stuff across there; now XML does have a couple of issues. If my company says for example that the price is 46.43 what exactly does price mean? Is that my cost including taxes, not including taxes, does this includes shipping what does this mean - price to the consumer, price to me from my distributor, that sort of thing. So, there needs to be some way for me to describe my XML what it means and of course there is. And I am going to talk to you in just a couple of minutes about how to deal with that in the next video. But so far you've seen XML; that is as simple as it can get, that's what XML does. It makes sure data is self-describing. Now one other issue is: how do we represent this larger and this smaller in the web browser, and we go back to our old friends the cascading style sheets and we tell it that the part number tags go like level H3 and the price tags go level say H5. So we can still use cascading style sheets to handle the formatting issues in the browser for the user, but the tags describe the data and give us more information to use on the programming side.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Microsoft Visual Basic .NET |
| Author: | Mark Long |
| SKU: | 33433 |
| ISBN: | 1932072349 |
| Release Date: | 2003-05-27 |
| Duration: | 6 hrs / 87 lessons |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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