Using XML in this Site

This site uses documents stored in XML to drive the content of the VB section. This article is stored in xml and then branded into both a rich HTML based version that uses the navigation templates for the site. Another copy is produced for the mobile section that contains just the information

Why is this a benefit

There are several reasons why this is good, firstly when the mobile section was added the navigation could be altered on all of the XML driven pages. It also alows me to keep the mobile section consistent with the web section since both come from the same source of content.

Content over style

The other benefit of using XML is that now I can concentrate on the content of each article. I can write this on my Palm Pilot and then simply copy to my PC and they will render as HTML or PDA friendly format. Other people can simply write content and I can quickly publish it using this sites templates. I no longer have to worry about designing the graphical look of pages unless I want to introduce a new template.

But it's not dynamic!

Well it is kind of dynamic - the content is stored as files but the stlye and look is applied later - this allows me to easily change both as mentioned above. Since the pages are stored on the web server in plain HTML (or text) they can be sent very fast by the web server. The actual content of an article rarely changes so we don't need the site to be truely dynamic.

what the heck is XML anyway?

That is probably the subject of another article but basically XML and HTML are both markup languages with a common parentage (SGML). XML allows the tagging of information to give it meaning but does not deal with how that information should be displayed.