LiveWorld Transcripts

Borders.com presents

Author Charles Goldfarb
“The XML Handbook”

June 8, 1999

NetCafeLive presents author Charles Goldfarb, author of “The XML Handbook.” Goldfarb, inventor of SGML, offers Web fanatics the capability to make the leap from HTML or SGML to sophisticated XTML resources.

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CCCarousel: Welcome to NetCafeLive, where we host authors and celebrities throughout the month. Thanks for joining us! Borders NetCafeLive is a joint production of Borders.com(tm) and Talk City(tm), a Talk City, Inc. Production. Tonight's guest is Charles Goldfarb, here to talk about his book “The XML Handbook.” Borders.com and Talk City are pleased to welcome tonight's guest, Charles Goldfarb. Welcome we are so happy to have you here with us at Talk City today, can you please explain to our audience what XML is and what it's used for?

Charles Goldfarb: Thanks! It's nice to be here! XML is the new markup language for the World Wide Web. Instead of describing how web pages should look, which is what HTML does, XML says what the data means which allows much smarter processing.

Blueyes: I know HTML, how hard will it be for me to learn XML with that knowledge?

Charles Goldfarb: If you know HTML, you are half way there! HTML and XML are both based on the same language called SGML so they look almost the same. The difference is that with XML you can use tags that are customized to your kind of data. So if your Web page is a computer shopping site, instead of tags for paragraphs and headings, it would have tags for model, dealer and price.

Pandaberry: Do you think XML will replace HTML and SGML in the future?

Charles Goldfarb: Each of the three has its place. Perhaps an analogy will help to explain why SGML is like custom tailored clothing. It can look any way that you want and there are thousands of combinations of options. XML is like shopping at the GAP - the detailed decisions are made for you, but there is still a lot of choice. As I mentioned before you get to pick your own tags. HTML is like wearing a uniform - you can only use the tags that have been defined for you.

HTMLnerd: Is this coding system any easier to learn than HTML? Or is its biggest feature customization for the Web page creator?

Charles Goldfarb: I don't know why those two have to be antithetical. Actually, the major use for XML today is for exchanging data among Web applications, enterprise databases and web clients. It isn't a Web page design language in the way that HTML is.

Blueyes: Should I convert to XML what I already have on HTML? How would I go about this?

Charles Goldfarb: HTML and XML, as I explained earlier, have two different purposes, so it's unlikely that you would convert from one to the other. However, there may be some data that you're putting on the Web that could be done better in XML than HTML. That's particularly true for e-commerce applications, where programs might want to work with the meaning of the data, not just the way it looks on the screen. There are 10 or 15 chapters in my book that describe application scenarios that are well suited for XML.

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