XML and Javascript: the right tool for the job?

Question

Hello,

For years I've been reading about XML and I have just not quite grokked it. Most documents I see about it simply explain the syntax (extraordinarily easy to understand) and say that it's portable: I've worked with Unix my whole life so the idea of putting things in plain text to be portable is hardly revolutionary. My specific question is that I have a document (my CV) that I would like to present to web visitors in several formats: as a webpage, as a pdf, or even as plain text. Is XML and Javascript the right approach to take?

What I need is for the document to be easily editable, conversion easy and just easy general upkeep. For example, when I publish a paper, I'd like to take less than five minutes to add the info and then have everything go automatically from there.

Give me your opinions: I also use LaTeX compulsively, so my current approach has been just to have my CV in LaTeX and to convert it to a web-page using LaTeXML. However, I sorta have the feeling that with everybody jumping up and down about XML and Javascript, that there might be something good to learn about it.

I would also like to simplify maintaining my homepage by not duplicating the same footer for every single page that I set up.

Thanks,

Joel

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Edit: I'll also take any book recommendations!

Answer 1

I think this is a slight misunderstanding of the combination of JavaScript and XML.

XML, in and of itself is an excellent means of representing data. It's largely human-readable, and easily parsed with libraries in nearly every programming language. That is the main benefit of XML.

Using XML with JavaScript is certainly a solution, but I think it's a matter of the question you're asking. JavaScript can parse XML, and allow you to obtain and manipulate data from your XML document. If you want to grab data from a server without reloading your HTML page (synchronously or asynchronously), then using JavaScript and XML is a valid way to do that.

If you want to, however, display your XML as a webpage, you would likely be better off using XML and XSLT [wikipedia], or perhaps PHP and XPath, to transform the document into browser-readable HTML. On the other hand, you could use nearly any language to convert the XML to a plain-text file, rich text file, or store it in a normalized database.

To sum up, XML is a great way to store data, because it can be used in so many different ways, and by so many different languages. It's an answer to many different questions; you just have to figure out which questions you're asking.

Answer 2

I've got a webpage with browser-side XSLT transformation up and running for years. It's a playground, only some words in german. See how easy it is to build this on heese.net/test. You can switch between "Beispiel" (=Demo) and XSL. The sourcecode of the page in the iframe is the XML. You can do this serverside with 3 lines of PHP-code.

On Javascript: you can use it with XSLT and I show this on my site, but it can't interact. First the XSLT builds an HTML page out of your XML data and after this job is completely done the Javascript in the resultig HTML document begins to work.

Parsing XML with Javascript is a different task.

Answer 3

To elaborate on my comment

1. The transformation to whatever output you desire is depending on how you store your CV on your server and whether you have the possibility to process it on the server. If you store it in XML, you can transform it to desired (binary) output using server based tools - that would for php be pdf and word (on windows server platform) for example. XML would be interesting from a mark-up point of view since it would make it clear where the table of contents, headers, lists of experience and so one would be found.
2. JavaScript cannot transform something into PDF or word, that has to be done on the server. What javascript can do is to get a text from the server in XML or JSON using AJAX and manipulate this into what the user sees on the screen. For XML that can be done with XSL(T) too. If you want for self-education purposes to use JavaScript, JSON is very nice since it is in my opinion more readable than XML and it creates a populated javascript object with the least work.
3. Footer in javascript: in the page have

<script type="text/javascript" src="footer.js"></script> and in footer.js, you can for example do

var footerText = 'Here goes whatever you want';
document.write(footerText);

Comparison between XML and JSON