I'm still quite unsure about XML's use for web
development.
I'm not quite sure what exactly do you mean. There's about
a zillion possible uses for XML in web development. Which
one of them are you having doubts about?
I understand XML is really helpful if we want to share /
transfer data between web and mobile, for instance.
Again, you're awfully vague. "Share / transfer"? If you're
talking about storing your content as XML, transforming it
server-side to serve the resulting documents in different
formats, that's always one of the options, and it has
certain advantages over other approaches, as well as
certain drawbacks.
If you're talking about serving XML documents, that's
generally not a very good idea. XHTML support across
browsers is pretty much nonexistant, and it offers few
advantages over serving good ole HTML 4.01 Strict. Serving
XML for client-side transformations might sound attractive,
and in certain cases it might save a good bit of client's
bandwidth; but serving gzipped content-oriented HTML is
normally good enough to achieve decent response times,
while relying on UA's capability to transform XML documents
is not a very good idea, because, well, what about my lynx?
And my Win Mobile 5 PDA? (Yeah, I know, I should update IE,
I heard the latest MSXML for ppcs includes an XSLT
processor--but hey, what about the average user who can't
be bothered? For that matter, now that I think about it,
I can't be bothered either.)
But I am unable to figure out if XML is at all useful if
we are only dealing with web.
Again, I think you're misunderstanding something. 'Web'
doesn't really come into it. The reasons for using XML in
your projects normally have very little to do with UI, and
everything to do with information storage, retrieval and
interchange. XML is neither a magic bullet nor a Holy Hand
Grenade of Antioch, but it does have a certain capacity for
killing razor-fanged bunnies that tend to crop up when
you're throwing your data back and forth among a dozen
components designed by a dozen different teams working on a
dozen (okay, half a dozen) different platforms.
I think database does a much better job for web
development than XML.
?
Again, I'm entirely unsure about what you could possibly
mean? Database does a much better job at what? At being the
data format you're exchanging information between your
server and UA-based thin client in? And what about DB2 9?
I am into web development using PHP/MySQL.
So am I, I do it for living. And your point is? 'I'm a
PHP/mySQL coder, and I'm not interested in XML, or OOA & D,
or MVC, or... because that's not what LAMP development is
all about,' or something like that?
Yeah, I know I'm overgeneralizing, it's just that my
co-workers routinely piss me off with that sort of
attitude: you know, 'I don't want to learn anything, I
already know everything I might ever need'. Sorry about
that, anyway.
I'm extremely conservative at heart, and not at all into
'follow the buzzword of the weak' sort of thing. But if
you simply ignore everything new, because you 'don't get
it', even before you've actually tried getting it, it's not
only gonna ruin your career--to hell with that damned
career--you'll be stuck heating your pizza in flintstone-
powered fireplace because you're unaware of microwave. If
you're still munching your HTMLs using regexes, as we did
back in the '95, I feel sorry for you.
Can someone enlighten me with some good examples?
*sigh* Good examples of what? Are you interested in XML-RPC
and SOAP? RSS feeds? RDF and semantic web? IBM's pureXML?
XSLT? XSL-FO? Perhaps you should explain what do you intend
to use XML for, because otherwise it is impossible to
elaborate. 'XML in web development' is not something you
can write a two-page summary for. A dozen papers wouldn't
be enough to cover it in any sort of detail.
