INFO CENTER MANIAQ

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a general-purpose specification for creating custom markup languages.[1] It is classified as an extensible language because it allows its users to define their own elements. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of structured data across different information systems, particularly via the Internet,[2] and it is used both to encode documents and to serialize data. In the latter context, it is comparable with other text-based serialization languages such as JSON and YAML.



It started as a simplified subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), and is designed to be relatively human-legible. By adding semantic constraints, application languages can be implemented in XML. These include XHTML,[4] RSS, MathML, GraphML, Scalable Vector Graphics, MusicXML, and thousands of others. Moreover, XML is sometimes used as the specification language for such application languages.
XML is recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It is a fee-free open standard. The recommendation specifies both the lexical grammar and the requirements for parsing.
To the new PHP programmer, XML is quite the mysterious thing. Recently I began writing a website that uses an XML template system, so I needed to find an easy way to parse my XML, and output it the way I needed it to be outputted. With PHP4 you have to build your own XML parser that will read and output your XML. So, with that idea I decided begin to explore PHP5, because of its simpleXML extensions.

Before jumping ahead and just building my parser, I knew that I’d have to replace elements in the XML document with data from my database; after all what would be the point of using XML for a template system if you couldn’t replace elements with your own data. So, keeping that in mind I know that I’d have to load each element of my XML document into a variable then send it through my own function to replace the things I need to replace, with the correct information. Now, let’s get started.