Ok. I am not an expert on and language but I get by decent enough on
javascript, PHP (and mySQL), VB (which has nothing to do with this), I
can do perl if I have to... But I do not have a clear understanding of
what XML is.

It appears to be a simple mark up language yet, from what I see, the
mark up looks like it is whatever is wanted. I mean it looks like you
make up your own tags. Is that basically what it is, some form of
customer "html"? - but I imagine that you need something that describes
what the tags do.

How does one implement XML?
What is it used for?

Also (not as important)...
I have a large XML file (KJV of The Bible) it has a lot of data in it.
I need to breaking up for use in a mySQL database. My initial idea would
be to us VB to work on the tags. But I thought there might already be
something out there that would let me define how to handle tags (such as
I want some tags gone, I have no need for them) and I want the XML split
in certain ways. I would like some of the tags attributes (I do not know
what else to call them) shortened to only the needed ones for my purpose)...

So is it best just to write some VB or is there something like that?

XML a standard for raw syntax. It isn't a markup language; it's a shared
base for many markup languages, to facilitate writing tools which can be
reused across many or all of them.

In other words, it occupies much the same niche that SGML did. (HTML is
an SGML-syntax markup language.) You can think of XML as a modernized,
replacement for SGML -- sort of a "RISC" SGML, trimmed down to the
essentials and cleaned up for today's needs.

For your task of importing of the XML version of the Bible, what one
would normally do is grab one of the many XML parsers on the market
which deal with all the details of properly reading and interpreting the
syntax, and present the output either as an event stream (SAX) or an
in-memory data model (DOM). Then all you'd have to write is the code
which interprets the SAX events, or walks the DOM tree, selecting from
that the information you want to copy into your database.

For details beyond that, I'm going to hand you my standard pointer to
IBM's developerWorks site (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/),
where you will find many tutorials and articles ranging from basic to
expert. At the very least, that will give you enough background to ask
useful questions.

Welcome to the 21st century!

--
Joe Kesselman,
http://www.love-song-productions.com/people/keshlam/index.html

{} ASCII Ribbon Campaign | "may'ron DaroQbe'chugh vaj bIrIQbej" --
/\ Stamp out HTML mail!  | "Put down the squeezebox & nobody gets hurt."

Oh, one other note: If you want to know more about what the markup in
your XML document actually _means_, you need to find out which XML-based
language was used. There may be comments, or a DTD (Document Type
Description) reference, or a Schema reference, at the top of the
document which will point you in the right direction to find more
information. If you aren't sure, ask whoever/wherever you got that
document from.

(BTW, note that some of the other great religious works of the world are
also available as XML documents; these were early test files for XML tools.)

--
Joe Kesselman,
http://www.love-song-productions.com/people/keshlam/index.html

{} ASCII Ribbon Campaign | "may'ron DaroQbe'chugh vaj bIrIQbej" --
/\ Stamp out HTML mail!  | "Put down the squeezebox & nobody gets hurt."

As you said, xml is a markup language, its original purpose was to allow webpages to be displayed in a set way regardless of the brower being used, in much the same way you can use xml to transport data caross systems and to be able to read that data independant of the platform or tied to any system.

You may find this short tutorial on xml useful,

http://www.liquid-technologies.com/xml.aspx

Also if you are going to be working with vb, take a look at liquid xml studio and its code gen function which will spit out vb, c# and c++ code based on your xml or schema.

http://www.liquid-technologies.com/xmldatabinding/xml-schema-to-vb.aspx

On 07/08/12 01:23, Michael Joel wrote:

The FAQ is at http://xml.silmaril.ie/

It's a misleading name. XML, like its predecessor SGML, is actually a
metalanguage to let you design your own markup. It's just a syntax: the
semantics are up to you.

Yes, exactly.

Not really; XHTML is written in XML, and so are hundreds of other markup
languages, like DocBook or TEI.

"Tags" (actually called "elements") don't "do" anything except sit there
and identify what's in them. I think what you may mean is that you need
a document describing how they should be used. Yes, you do, and if you
invent a new markup language using XML, you need to write that document.

For example, DocBook5 is described in
http://www.docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/docbook.html; the TEI is described
in http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/; XHTML is described in
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/; ODF is described in
https://www.oasis-open.org/standards#opendocumentv1.2, and OOXML is
described in
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm

By using a markup language written in XML for your application. You then
need companion languages like XSLT2 to transform the XML into specific
targets (eg HTML or PDF), XQuery for specifying searches, and a whole
bunch of other X-things to do assorted other tasks.

Pretty much everything these days. Although originally designed for text
markup, it can also be used for rectangular data, so you'll find it used
for config files, data transfer, messaging, e-commerce, medicine, and
lots of other areas.

Do you mean metadata? That is, data OTHER than the actual text? Like
links, explanations, commentary, etc?

Technically possible, but I'd use XSLT2.

XSLT2 sounds like what you want. It's a programming language actually
written in XML syntax. There are several implementations: probably the
most popular is Saxon.

///Peter