The Blog of Anders Nissen

torsdag, januar 06, 2005

XML Rules!

I've been experimenting a little with making a XML based logging system in C++.
XML has been a really big buzz-word for a while, but it seems that the XML bird has some trouble taking off. A lot of people have yet to find out about XML - myself included, until a few days ago.

XML uses a very simple HTML-like syntax for storing data. It's basically just a left angled bracket, the tag name, a right angled bracket, the data for the tag, a left angled bracket and a slash, the tag name and finishing off with another right angled bracket.
Like so: < TAG > DATA < / TAG >

Then there are all sorts of things you can do to complicate things when you get more experienced, like adding setting-tags inside the tag-definition, including tags inside other tags and much more stuff like that.

The beautiful aspect of XML is in its simplicity. Because it has a certain set of definitions of how the data is stored, it's possible for everyone to read XML straight and in most cases get a very good idea of what's being stored, and most importantly it allows for data to be seamlessly shared between different computer, platforms, companies etc..

If you couple XML with scripting capabilities such as XSL stylesheets you can present the data stored in the XML in any way you like, and changing how the data is displayed doesn't change or modify the original data in any way.

If you haven't experimented with XML I suggest that you go ahead and give it a twirl.

Happy New Year!

Yeah, I know it's a bit late to be saying happy New Year but heck, I'm doing it anyway!
Of course, I could have changed to timestamp of the post to be Januar 1. 2005 00:01, but that would be cheating.

So there you have it: Happy New Year!

I hope I made it into the new year sately, and that this will be a great year for you!