[ANSTHRLD] Somewhat OT: Tech Help (XML files)

Adalia adalia.nyx at gmail.com
Thu May 19 06:02:38 PDT 2011


There is another free software title called Notepad++.  Tell Notepad++ that
the language is HTML and then open the xml file in Notepad++ and it will
color the tags differently making the data more easy to see.

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 4:10 PM, Joseph Percer <jpercer at gmail.com> wrote:

> As a follow-up, I dropped the file into OpenOffice just now out of
> curiosity, and it parsed it into readable data.
>
> Andrewe
>
> On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 4:01 PM, Joseph Percer <jpercer at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Gotcha! I appreciate the information, and I'll have to see what I can
> > do to chop the information into a readable form.
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > Andrewe
> >
> > On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 3:57 PM, Tim McDaniel <tmcd at panix.com> wrote:
> >> On Wed, 18 May 2011, Joseph Percer <jpercer at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Sadly, I cannot figure out how to open and read the downloaded
> >>> files, which are marked up using an XML document. Can someone direct
> >>> me how to read XML marked up data? Opening the file in a web browser
> >>> just shows the markup language and not what I'm actually after.
> >>>
> >>> The source is located at: http://ota.oucs.ox.ac.uk/headers/1685.xml
> >>
> >> XML is purely an encoding of data in a machine-readable form.  XML
> >> provides no formatting or meaning for anything in it.
> >>
> >> For example,
> >>    <person>
> >>        <givenName>Tim</givenName>
> >>        <surname>McDaniel</surname>
> >>        <email>tmcd at panix.com</email>
> >>    </person>
> >>
> >> is a valid fragment of XML.  All it's expressing is that there's an
> >> instance of an object called "person", and there are three data that
> >> it contains, and names each datum and provides its value.  It says
> >> nothing about how it ought to be displayed on a screen, in a browser,
> >> or whatever.  I chose "person", "givenName", "surname", and "email" as
> >> object instances.  There is no central repository of meaning or
> >> elements.   You can choose whatever elements you like and ascribe such
> >> structure and meaning as you like.
> >>
> >> So asking about how to read an XML data file is like asking how to
> >> read a column of numbers.  The meaning of the data is provided by an
> >> outside source, and it's up to you to grok it or display it in ways
> >> that are useful to you.
> >>
> >> There's a programming language called XSLT that can transform XML into
> >> different XML.  Once you've learned XSLT, you could write code to
> >> produce XML that happens to be valid HTML.  (Depending on how familiar
> >> with programming you are and how complicated the XML is, that could
> >> take hours to weeks.)  But that's like taking a column of numbers and
> >> deciding to make a bar chart out of them: it's how you decided to
> >> represent it.
> >>
> >> Danett Lincoln
> >> --
> >> Tim McDaniel, tmcd at panix.com
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Heralds mailing list
> >> Heralds at lists.ansteorra.org
> >> http://lists.ansteorra.org/listinfo.cgi/heralds-ansteorra.org
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Joseph M. Percer, AAS, LP
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Joseph M. Percer, AAS, LP
> _______________________________________________
> Heralds mailing list
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> http://lists.ansteorra.org/listinfo.cgi/heralds-ansteorra.org
>



-- 
HL Adalia VonderBerg

There are two ways to be creative.  One can sing and dance.  OR one can
create an environment where singers and dancers flourish - Warren Bennis



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