Chapter 8 Working with XML Documents

Dynamo and XML

XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. It is a framework for creating markup languages. Each XML markup language is a set of tags (or elements), and a set of rules about where each element can occur.

HTML is an example of a markup language. It contains elements such as headings, lists, tables, and so on. There are rules governing where these elements can occur.

XML provides a framework for data exchange. An XML document can hold many kinds of data, including file formats, relational database data, and information transmitted from Web browsers to Web servers.

For example, you can use XML to describe a sales transaction exchanged between two applications or to describe the contents of a Web page. For the remainder of this chapter, the word document is used to mean any XML document.

Dynamo and XML

Dynamo provides several tools for working with XML.

DynaScript functions and tags that let you take information from a database, and provide it to a Web browser in XML form.
For information, see "Creating XML documents".
A DynaScript function to parse XML documents (process them into a form understandable by the application).
For information, see "Creating the DOMDocument object".
A set of DynaScript objects to access individual pieces of a parsed document.
For information, see "Introduction to the Document Object Model".
A set of DynaScript objects to create and modify XML documents.
For information, see "Using the DOM interface to create and edit XML documents".
A utility function (xmlEscape ) to aid in escaping data for XML.
For information, see "Escaping text with xmlEscape".