Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 13:38:39 -0400 From: Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, gps Subject: InformationWeek on XML. February 8, 1999 Information Week has an article by Don Kiely, entitled XML: More Than Just A Quick Fix. The article describes XML and its related standards, the Extensible Style Language (XSL) and XML Linking Language (XLL). XSL is like a programming language for the data in XML pages. It provides simple Case statements (xsl:choose), conditional branching (xsl:if), and condition and loop testing (xsl:for-each). The second part of the XSL spec is used to provide formatting objects with attributes you can set for flexible formatting. XLL gives far greater linking capabilities than HTML, including links to multiple destinations, bidirectional links, links with custom behaviors, links to locations within documents even without special tags and a wider span of addressing to different page elements. Finally, IBM, Unisys, and other partners recently published proposed XML Metadata Interchange proposal (XMI), which integrates XML with the Uniform Modeling Language, and the Object Management Group's Meta Object Facility repository standard. XMI will let developers of distributed systems share object models. The article also describes XML namespace mechanism, designed to avoid conflicts between same tags in different applications. for full text, see http://www.informationweek.com/720/iuxml.htm
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