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At our September meeting, Marc Rochkind and Tom Cargill gave
complementary talks that provided us with a great overview of
the structure and capabilities of XML. Much useful information
can be obtained at
http://metalab.unc.edu/xml.
Mark began by telling us that he doesn't know anything about
XML, and hasn't been using it-- and then proceeded to show us
the limitations of HTML and how XML solves them. Marc used the
example of an HTML table showing clothing items and prices,
and how a Web search engine has no semantic means to interpret
the table as giving the prices in column 2 for the items in column 1.
Further, few people write syntatically-correct HTML. This
works fine for Web browsers, which loosely interpret it, but
it makes it very difficult for tools to make semantic interpretations
of syntatically-inconsitent data.
Marc's presentation can be found at: http://www.basepath.com/FRUUG/XML.
Tom began his talk with the claim that XML isn't as useful for
Web-based utilities as it is for programs which read, manipulate,
and write data-- in other words, everything. Tom gave examples of
the plethora of tools that are becoming available for reading in
XML data descriptions, manipulating it, and writing it back out.
Tom's presentation is available in Portable Document Format:
./XML/cargill.pdf.
Four speakers gave brief overviews of what they're doing with XML:
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John Meier of Freshtech discussed his use of XML in
performance monitoring of Web servers that deliver
dynamic content
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Wally Wedel of Sun Microsystems presented an XML-based graphics
package
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Bruce Haddon, also of Sun, discussed the role of XML in Sun's
Jiro initiative for integrated storage management.
His presentation is available in PDF format at:
./XML/haddon.pdf
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Dick Hackathorn, of WebFarming, gave a brief presentation on his
company's use of XML to discover and acquire web content for
systematic business intelligence
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