Chapter 8 Working with XML Documents

Dynamo and XML

XML, eXtensible Markup Language is a framework for creating markup languages. Each XML markup language is a set of tags (or elements), and a set of rules about where each element can occur.

HTML is an example of a markup language. It contains elements such as headings, lists, tables, and so on. There are rules that govern where and how each element can be used.

XML provides a framework for data exchange. An XML document can hold many kinds of data, including file formats, relational database data, and information transmitted from Web browsers to Web servers.

For example, you can use XML to describe a sales transaction exchanged between two applications or to describe the contents of a Web page. For the remainder of this chapter, the word document is used to mean any XML document.

Dynamo and XML

Dynamo provides several tools for working with XML.

DynaScript functions and tags that let you take information from a database, and provide it to a Web browser in XML form. See "Creating XML documents".
A DynaScript function to parse XML documents (process them into a form understandable by the application). See "Creating the DOMDocument object".
A set of DynaScript objects to access individual pieces of a parsed document. See "Introduction to the Document Object Model".
A set of DynaScript objects to create and modify XML documents. See "Using the DOM interface to create and edit XML documents".
A utility function (xmlEscape ) to aid in escaping data for XML. See "Escaping text with xmlEscape".