Re: newby (very) question on XML DB theory

"ccc31807" <ccc31807_at_hotmail.com> wrote in message news:22e055d5.0404081020.6efb1436_at_posting.google.com...
> "Eric Kaun" <ekaun_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:<%Jkac.1359$C_2.1054_at_newssvr15.news.prodigy.com>...
> > What is the meaning of "mark up", and why would one want to do it? What
is
> > the difference between "marking up" and actually defining your data in
some
> > rigorous way? I assume you're talking about marking up TEXT, rather
than
> > data.
>
> In this case, the data is all text (ASCII or ISO-8859-1). The data
> will mostly be searched. That is, it will be updated very seldom. The
> results of searches need to be displayed via HTTP. In this case, it
> just makes sense to create a little application that can search the
> documents using XPath, and use CSS to display the resulting data.
>
> We can assume that the datums will look something like this:
>
> <course no="CPSC101" credit="3" hours="3" lab="4">
> <title>Introduction to Programming Logic</title>
> <prerequisite>none</prerequisite>
> <description>Whatever the description is ... </description>
> </course>

Of course you can do it that way, although frequently-updated data aren't the only data which benefit from a relational database. If you already have it in that format, won't need to share the data with other programs, don't need much efficiency, won't be doing ad hoc queries, etc. etc., then using XPath on text in that format is the quickest way to achieve HTML output. Received on Thu Apr 08 2004 - 21:31:26 CEST