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Website-Technical

posted April 20, 2004

X-What?

XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language, and has become the new standard for transferring information on the web. It is a markup approach that allows for user-defined markup tags, and has also been used to establish many widely accepted "grammars" of data structures, including XHTML and XSLT. XML, in short, is a standard for structuring raw data for transfer on the internet.

XHTML stands for eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language. It is very similar to the common HTML, with a few changes to make it conform to the XML standard. In other words XHTML is a formal grammar of XML.

XSLT stands for eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation, and is an XML grammar that takes (with the help of, for example, a browser engine) XML data as input, and produces (most commonly) HTML or XHTML as output. In other words XSLT adds the structural layout elements to raw XML data to allow the data to be presented to the user in some user-friendly format. Typically the XSLT output would be structured to take advantage of the CSS technology.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet, and isolates and centralizes the user-defined stylistic and positional rules for rendering web pages. This leaves the HTML author with only the logical specifications (eg. class="sidebar-right-wide") which causes the browser to look up the specifics about border width, position, background colour, etc. in the CSS file.

The combination of these technologies is currently leading-edge, and not required for our website. We have opted instead for the simpler HTML 4.01 Transitional standard. However, because we have implemented the CSS portion, when the rest becomes mainstream or required, the website can be upgraded without unnecessary effort.

Google any of the terms for more information. Go to www.w3.org for technical specifications.

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