I am trying to figure out if it would be possible to write
an app that could visit certain website, obtain the
relevant data from those pages and convert it into a
readable XML file.
What's the problem? Retrieve the document using your http
library of choice, parse it using your HTML parser of
choice, feed the DOM document to your XSLT processor of
choice, serialize the resulting DOM document (using, well,
your serializer of choice). Better yet, stuff the resulting
DOM document into your XML database of choice. Heck, make
it RDF/XML, stuff it into some SPARQL-aware storage and
venture capitalists will be swarming all over you. I would,
if I had a few million bucks I didn't need. Providing
third-party semantics for all the meatbag-parsable content
on the web will be quite an industry some ten years from
now I think.
Okay, scratch that, I'm just daydreaming. But the basic
process for your task would be what I described indeed (the
real heart of it would be an XSLT transformation that would
suck the relevant data out of your source document,
naturally).
All I would like to know is how would I go about starting
this task, and any advice comments anyone has on it.
My professional opinion is that if you don't even know where
to start, you're not really up for it. I hope you don't
need it for anything serious--but it certainly would make
an excellent exercise in many modestly exciting areas.
