A clarifiation on web design

[monikasiberkat]

Thanks for all the info. Most of this I am learning in school. Today you have to design for the blind, legally blind, hearing impaired, for small hand held items and large browsers. Yep Firefox is taking over. Right now I am reading the Zen of CSS book and every other chapter talks about support problems with IE. I really don't like to work on

Comments

More than you wanted to know....

[sebkha]

XML doesn't actually do anything by itself. It's essentially just a standard for designing document formats. XML says that there are elements delimited by angled brackets like this and entities delimited with ampersand and semicolon like this &entity;. An actual XML-based document format goes further to specify what actual elements and entities exist.

XHTML is HTML rebuilt using XML. The entities are things like
for paragraph, and the entities are things like é for a lowercase E with an acute accent.

There are quite a few other XML-based formats in wide use, including the SVG format for vector images (Illustrator can export to this format, and web browsers other than IE will display it) and the RSS format used for weblog and news article feeds. They all look similar, with elements and entities as well, but they have different ones from XHTML. Instead of paragraphs and tables, SVG has strokes and circles and filters, and RSS has news items and descriptions and links.

If someone needs to invent a document format, basing it on XML makes it easier because there's already a lot pre-existing software that knows how to look inside an XML file. The reason this becomes important for web design is that often there will be an XML-based document which describes things in using qualities such as prices, weights, dates, or whatever, but without any notion of how they should be displayed. The designer creates the user interface for that document, deciding how the raw data should be clearly and attractively displayed. This might be as simple as a template web page with blanks that are filled in from the XML document, or a lot more complicated!