ARTICLES & TUTORIALS FOR XML DEVELOPMENT: XML Data Island Tutorials, including Embedding / Binding XML data Sources to HTML Tables & Documents

Doing Tables with XML - Displaying groups of data with HTML tables can be messy and result in complicated code on a web page. XML can provide a method to simplify this kind of web page by binding an XML data source to the html table. This technique is referred to as a 'data island' and is one of the simplest uses of XML on a web page. Although this in itself is useful, there are a number of limitations with the technique. The next and more powerful step is to utilize an extensible style sheet transform (XSLT) to actually generate the web page.

Embedding XML into HTML using Data Island - With Internet Explorer, XML can be embedded into HTML pages in Data Islands.

Using the XML Data Source Object - In this article, I'll explain how to include the XML DSO, extract content from an external XML file, extract XML data that’s embedded in a Web page and manipulate that data using JavaScript.

Accessing XML Data using ASP, Part 2 - In Part 1 we looked at accessing stand alone XML files. In this part, we'll examine three other alternatives to accessing XML data!

Two Tier Data Islands with Expanding/Collapsing Child elements - This demo shows an example of a two-tier data relationship. In these examples, I am using the xml DataBinding features in IE to represent the One To Many relationship of data in an XML file. Each of the examples allow the user to hide and show the child elements. This allows for better screen real estate and a more elegant display of the data. Below are different variations on how this can be done

Bind HTML data elements to XML data islands - XML provides a universal medium for delivering data, and IE 5.0+ offers the functionality to quickly create data solutions. One of these functions is the ability to bind HTML elements to data sources, specifically, XML data islands.

XML code library - Do you have a developer website? You can host this code library on your website click here to find out how! All this information is donated by the users who use the XML code library click here to contribute your code!

Binding Client Side Controls Dynamically to an XML Data Source Object - XML data island can be a disadvantage because they are read only. Since the XML is simply a text file on the server or a section of code on the client side, you could imagine the problems in trying to maintain concurrency and connection. If you need to update the data source, use the Remote Data Service (RDS)...

XML Tutorial - As you will have seen in the last part of the tutorial, browsers are not particularly good at formatting XML, and only the very latest browsers support it at all. Although most of the time XML will be used to define data, not to display it, there may be occasions where you decide that you want to format the XML data for viewing. There are three main ways of doing this.