XML articles, tutorials and tips using PHP.

With the New Year (2003), I thought I might as well start it off with trying to figure out what all the fuss is with eXtensible Markup Language XML. I even went out and bought myself a book on the subject which is, something I rarely do.

So I spent a few days flipping through the 1,000 odd pages and I STILL don't know how useful XML is going to be for me and the scripts in PHP that I write. Even stranger, I still can't figure out what the fuss is with putting all the data into an XML file when I can have (I assume) faster access to data in a database.

Hmmm... the force is weak with this one.

If there's anything I already like about XML, it's the abbreviation overkill and the cool sounding names for everything connected to it.

Off-hand, there's XML, SAX, DOM, XSLT, RDF, XPath, XPointer, DTD, XML-RPC, XUL, XBL and trust me, a lot more than I can list right now. I really love the names they use like Sablotron, Expat and Schematron.

Over the next few months, this page will probably evolve into something else but for now, I've only figured out the way to setup Apache and PHP with XML support for the 3 main XML derivatives: SAX, DOMXML and XSLT.

It's a good first step... How to enable XML in PHP on Windows Me.