"gregjohn" <pte### [at] yahoocom> schrieb im Newsbeitrag 
news:web.4ba35bf7c9c03e2434d207310@news.povray.org...
> Please no one GIYF me! :)

Well, I hate those GIFY-guys, too. If I ask something it is usually because 
I did not find the info I was looking for - for whatever reason 
(misspelling, being swamped with useless information from Google, being too 
lazy to learn the povray-manual by heart - mea culpa ;-). If somebody knows 
he should tell what to search for or simply ignore me.

Back to your topic ;-)

XML is a data-format that can be very easily ported across platforms. That's 
it - no more, no less. Actually this is quite  a lot ;-) If you need not 
worry whether your INT has 16, 32 or 64 bits (and so on) - this has a 
certain appeal. It is human-readable in theory; in practise you need an 
editor to do anything complex. Still - a config-file in xml is much more 
easily edited than one in a custom binary-format.

Raw XML-coded data makes for very large files, which >was< an issue 10 years 
ago. Your average harddisk had a capacity of 300 MB (note: MB, not GB ;-) 
and zipping took much longer on slow computers then. Nowadays you just gzip 
your XML-file and a google-sitemap shrinks from 300 kB down to a measly 6 
kB.

IF Microsoft would have had better support of XML and XSLT (which is a 
stylesheet language for XML and in XML) in their early browser versions, 
most webpages today would be written in XML and XSLT, I guess. In fact, most 
CMS-based sites probably are, but instead of using XML and XSLT directly and 
letting the browser do the necessary transforms you use XSLT to transform 
into HTML, which is better supported on older browsers. You have to have 
 >some< for very old browsers in every commercial website, if you like it or 
not. The higher ranking the CEO, th more he is bound to cling to Internet 
Explorer 5.0 - though, to be fair, the more progressive ones use IE 6.0. 
Which they usually view on their high-res 24"-TFT monitor which is set to a 
resolution of 800 x 600, so they can "see" better. Unfortunately "Rita" from 
"Working Daze" seems to be everywhere - but I digress.

I personally used XML and XSLT about five years ago to create an off-line 
CMS for a webshop using the then new VB Express 2005. Use MS-Access to store 
the data, use program to create an in-memory xml-file and use xslt to 
transform it to static HTML. Upload output to server or to CD and be done. 
It had German and English output (you just had to write the respective 
XSLT-files) and would have been easily portable to other languages.

IMO: XML is probably the future. It would be nice if there were more 
standardized XML-based data-formats (or namespaces) around, so you could use 
ONE file to upload your catalogues to any marketplace on the web. It would 
be nice, too, if those in existence were better supported, like SVG. Ever 
tried to port complex SVG from Inkscape to any other graphics editor of your 
choice?

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