xml ???

[spnwebdesign]

what exactly is xml used for?

i dont know wether to learn it or not and every time i look at a description of what it is it goes into all this mad detail of what it does, not what its used for

can anyone help me here and tell me what its used for and is it worth learnin?

[rossable]

its basically a text only database.
when used with XSLT it can mimic SQL type calls and functions.

it's just a way of storing and sorting data.

it's best for smaller needs when using a SQL server would just be overkill.

[spnwebdesign]

so it would be a better idea to learn php and mySQL?

[Toon]

What is XML?

XML is a markup language for documents containing structured information.

Structured information contains both content (words, pictures, etc.) and some indication of what role that content plays (for example, content in a section heading has a different meaning from content in a footnote, which means something different than content in a figure caption or content in a database table, etc.). Almost all documents have some structure.

A markup language is a mechanism to identify structures in a document. The XML specification defines a standard way to add markup to documents.

I always think of it as a universal settings document, it stores how a certain code structure works, what's useful about it is it stores certain tags so it can be applied to a general set of codes to make them work in a particular way.

(Hope that makes sense)

[rossable]

it depends on the needs.
personnaly i know XML/XSLT and have had no occasion to need to know SQL yet.

XML and flash work really well together and occasionally some programmers use it to story large array sets that they don't want to take up line space with embedded with the other functions.

[mjhoagland]

XML stand for eXtensible Markup Language. It is a way to represent data, whichever form that may be. XML files can hold data that represent a flight schedule, employees, user access roles, appointment data, etc. There are other files that are XSLTs that are by design supposed to take XML files and present them in a usable fashion, not implying you're stuck to use XSLTs only. ASP.Net for example in it's System.XML namespace provides dozens of tools for processing XML data. It just depends on the platform you're developing with.

Now this doesn't mean that XML files aren't meant to replace databases. This is not true. XML is good for small data requirements such as a config document mentioned by Toon. Databases are still ideal for large-scale / high-speed data storage and recover of tabular data.