Building Web Sites with XML

Intended Audience: 

Building Web Sites with XML  was designed to serve as a practical guide to Web designers, Web application developers, and Webmasters who want to use XML to enhance the look, feel, interoperability, operation, and maintenance of their Web sites.  This book aims to address the needs of a wide variety of Web developers -- from those who are comfortable with HTML to application developers using more sophisticated languages such as Java and C++.  Other stated goals of the author include a pledge to platform neutrality and to cover all the technologies and tools that a developer will need to develop real-world XML applications.

Summary:

Building Web Sites with XML is divided into four parts.  The author advises us to read the book from cover to cover and then use specific parts and chapters as a reference while we build our XML Web site.

Part one of Building Web Sites with XML, provides a background in the new Web standards and vocabularies that form the basis for XML Web site design.  In this part, the author introduces XML in terms of what it is and what the Web developer can do with it.  A bit of history of the Web and why XML evolved sets the stage for this part of the book.  XSL is also introduced briefly in part one, and the relationship among XML, HTML, and XSL is explained.  This book makes no attempt to provide an XML tutorial.  Rather, it refers to reader to other books in the Goldfarb Series for XML tutorials.  Instead this first part of the book focuses on working with XML and the differences between working with XML and working with its predecessor, HTML.  Lots of code examples are used so that a developer can clearly see and understand the differences between these two Web languages.  In following the "how it works" philosophy of the book, XSL transformations are highlighted.  Again code samples show how XSLT works and why a developer would use it.

Part 2 of Building Web Sites with XML focuses on client-side XML.  In this part of the book, the XML interface known as DOM (Document Object Model) is introduced. Two chapters are dedicated to exploring how Internet Explorer can be used on the client with XML (at the time of writing, IE5 is the only commercial browser that supports XML presentation).  Chapter 8 provides different approaches to presenting XML in a browser and compares the benefits and drawbacks of each.

Part 3 of Building Web Sites with XML focuses on server-side XML.  This part focuses on the idea of storing documents in XML on the server and using a series of style sheets to serve the XML as HTML for a specific browser type on the client.  This involves the creation of a "gateway program" to detect the client-side browser and select the appropriate style sheet for that browser.  In this part of the book, options for handling server-side XML, including CGI, Perl, Java and Active Server Pages are outlined and code samples provided.

Part 4 of Building Web Sites with XML focuses on advanced XML topics.  In this part of the book XML forms and the XML schema definition language are presented.  The final chapter provides a summary of all the concepts presented in the book and shows the reader how to build an XML Web site.  The accompanying CD-ROM provides this XML Web site on the CD-ROM, complete with source code for all the programs that support the site.

I found this to be a great "how to" book for Web developers that want to quickly make the transition to XML.  It provides the kind of "step-by-step" direction that a developer needs to get started.  The wealth of examples and the provision of a working XML Web site that can be used as a template for my own site are extremely  useful. 

Final Note:

 I liked the approach of the book so much, that I am planning a track at the XML 2000 Conference called "Building an XML Web Site" and have invited Michael Floyd to serve as a co-chair for that track.  Michael has accepted my offer and you can meet him this December at the conference in Washington DC.