Flexible Data Representation
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is the universal format, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for structured documents and data on the Web.When data is made available in this format, it is very easy for different software houses to interpret and use the data. Important information about its nature and format is available both within the data itself and in the central specification.
XML considerably simplifies the processes of transmission, validation, and interpretation of data between applications and between organisations.
When used in conjunction with the Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) language, XML also provides a powerful way of separating out the business logic tier of a web application from its presentation tier.
The business logic tier is concerned with submitting and extracting data to and from the core data structure, expressing its results as XML. XSLT is used to convert the XML data into HTML for presentation to the user.
In this way future revision of the presentation of the site can be undertaken simply by changing only the presentation specifics in the XSLT files, disrupting the solidity of the business logic tier.
An example use by Whitespace was the integration of an online household insurance system with a long-standing back-office administration system on a different platform, by passing XML messages between the two.
If you would like more information please contact Lucy Jaffé.
