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Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) form an integral part of many XML applications. They also make web site design -- and web re-design -- infinitely easier. To see this in action, select a theme from the pull-down menu below. The entire page layout changes, but the only change within the HTML of this page is the CSS! How did we function before CSS?!

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Karen Vagts: XML Portfolio

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XML Experiments

A lot of mainstream software applications now offer XML capabilities of some sort. I'm curious about how these work and if they are of any use without a lot of custom XML programming. Here are the results of some experiments.

Filemaker

FileMaker is a popular, easy-to-use database application for small to medium size organizations and departments. The past few versions of FileMaker have offered XML capabilities and in fact a lot of the application's support files are written in XML.

My first effort at working with FileMaker was to try to import one of my Spanish gazetteer XML sheets into FileMaker using the option to create a new database from an XML file. The software didn't approve of the files, finding either errors in the style sheets or "white space." So I decided to build a database separately, using data exported from INE, which is Spain's very nice statistical website (equivalent of the U.S. Census bureau); I used some basic statistic about the Autonomous regions' tourism industry, converted into an Excel worksheet, then directly created a simple table in FileMaker. Then I tested the Export as XML features.

To export data into a FileMaker file, you must use either one of FileMaker's two built-in XSL files or create your own. Note: Per its documentation, FileMaker Pro uses a Xerces-based XML parser and a Xalan-based XSLT processor for validation.

• The first built-in style sheet, entitled FMPXMLRESULT, produces the following XML file >> Not very exciting but perhaps you will recognize the names of some of the automous regions and understand that there are 3 fields -- Comunidad, Overnight stays, and travel. Per FileMaker, this style sheet or "grammar" is best used for validation and for importing data among different FileMaker databases. It won't work well with CSS and it includes database structure metadata that doesn't apply to most other applications.
• The second built-in style sheet, entitled MPDSORESULT, contains no database meta-data and can be used with CSS, as shown here >> This looks more clearly like a set of data record entries. Also, prior to the export, the two numeric fields for the tourist statistics were formatted to show 1000 commas and two decimal points and this formatting was captured.

Note that there are limits with these export "grammers." You can't export infinite related fields or repeating fields or "container field" (images, sounds, film clips) contents. Nonetheless, this can be a good way to export data from FileMaker for other uses.

Next I will try to develop a custom grammar that will work with a FileMaker export for producing a more convention and prettier HTML type page.

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