Why XML?

XML recently celebrated its 5th birthday and in its short life it’s managed to become de rigueur in nearly every application that’s released. Its quick and dramatic rise can be attributed to an increasing need for systems to communicate with one another, regardless of vendor or language. The sheer number of different systems available made communication between applications impossible without a common language that they could all speak.

Luckily, there exists an organisation called the World Wide Web Consortium, commonly referred to as the W3C, which establishes protocols for use on the Web. In February 1998, the W3C published the specification for XML 1.0, a simple but very flexible way of structuring data meaningfully. It’s simplicity meant that it could easily be adapted by applications and its flexible ensured that it would be used in a wide variety of ways.

There exists a multitude of excellent documents about XML and how it’s used and I’m not going to add to the crowd by publishing the same information here.

One recommended article can be found at XML.com – What is XML?

What I would like to concentrate on is how Amaxus CMS uses XML and what benefits it can bring you.

Separation of content from presentation

All too often in the past, the content of the web page was intertwined with HTML tags to format its presentation correctly. Anyone with experience of this will be able to tell you how difficult and time consuming it can be to change the layout of the document. XML describes the content of the document only and leaves the presentation of it to a stylesheet format called XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language). This allows the design of the template to be changed relatively easily and can be done without having to change any content.

Amaxus makes simple layout changes even more painless by providing a graphical tool called a block editor. Menus, content, newsfeeds etc can be added, deleted and moved around the page with ease. It can also provide different layouts for different parts of the site.

Various Output Formats

Amaxus generates all of its content in XML which enables it to deliver its content to a wide variety of systems in a wide variety of formats. For instance, a person viewing the site could view the same content in a variety of formats:

• HTML
• Low graphics HTML
• PDF
• RDF
• Native XML
• PDA compatible HTML
• WML (for mobile phones)
• WebTV

The content is entered into the system only once but can be viewed according the user's preferred format. 

Communication with other systems

Using a variety of XML based protocols, Amaxus is able to communicate with other systems and use the returned information. Three examples of how Amaxus communicates with other systems are:
 
External site search using RDF
The RDF protocol supports the interoperability of metadata, allowing resources on the web to describe themselves.
Using RDF (Resource Description Framework), it is possible to search the contents of another site and provide links to that information. As long as a site provides an RDF document (as Amaxus does) that summarizes its content then it can be searched and linked to.

For more information on RDF see  XML.com - What is RDF?

RSS Newsfeed
Many sites provide an RSS (RDF Site Summary) feed. In essence, this is an XML document describing the latest information to be published on a site. News sites in particular incorporate this technology, which gives other unrelated sites the opportunity to display links to these news items on their own site. Amaxus allows you to specify any number of news feeds to use, you can even display different news feeds on different parts of the site.
For example, it would be possible to show the latest UK news from the BBC on your site by linking to this RSS feed:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/syndication/feeds/news/ukfs_news/uk/rss091.xml

For more information on RSS see What is RSS?

Web Services
While RDF & RSS allow you to find out whats on another site, web services allow you to actually use applications on a different site. It uses an XML based specification called SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and can be used to provide functionality on a site that would otherwise be expensive and time consuming to implement. For example, using Amaxus, it is possible to use a web service to send an SMS message directly to a mobile phone anywhere in the world. The Box UK site uses this facility to enable contact details to be sent to a users mobile phone.

For more information on Web Services see
XML.com - A Web Services Primer.

Benefits

XML has given us the opportunity to construct a flexible, easy to use package.

XML has given you the opportunity to easily administrate your site whilst taking advantage of many cutting-edge technologies by using Amaxus.