Chapter 11. Conclusion

This report has presented some XML techniques using a single example application in order to give a pedagogical overview of the different approaches to processing XML files. The fact that we could apply different processing models on the same example illustrates the richness of the XML world which is part of almost every facet of computer systems. Working on this example was our own way of learning XML, so the techniques we used in this document should not be viewed as optimal or definitive. We also tried to make some connections with other computer science techniques in order to profit from our previous knowledge.

Even though, XML as been jokingly defined as Lisp with fat parentheses, we think that we have shown that there is much more to it in the sense of type checking, programming and interoperability and ease of use by means of many public domain efficient tools. Given the breadth of applications and the multitude of competing proposals to extend or use XML, we have deliberately ignored many details in order to focus on the main ideas, which are at end quite simple.

XML is now a given fact of life in computer science often in hidden ways (e.g. with the AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) technology that is now part of every modern web browser which also include a stylesheet interpreter; XML files can now be sent directly without having to be translated into HTML before hand. XML processing is only starting and much more remains to be done, especially because it is one of the fundamental building block of the Semantic Web initiative [8]. XML is the encoding for upper level languages such as RDF for defining information about documents and for OWL to define ontologies.