Some websites have “About Us” sections with five bio writeups, others have product catalogs with hundreds of entries. But many sites we’ve worked on this past year lie somewhere in between, and that’s when we’ve found XML to be just right tool for sorting data.
XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. As the name implies, it’s a more flexible markup language than HTML, used to store and retrieve data in a more efficient manner. XML allows us to add and remove data and elements of a page without altering the structure of the page. This is done by storing the data separately from the HTML document in an XML document, or in “Data Islands” within the HTML, allowing the HTML focus on formatting and display.
This makes XML ideal for smaller datasets that may not require the investment and resources of a server side database—the perfect tool for your photo gallery, your employee roster, or even your online store. Here are two examples.
The first is meritcapital.com, a private equity firm’s site that uses XML in two places. On their Team section, you can search 15 employees by name or position; on their Portfolio section, you can browse 60 projects by investment type or fund number. Not only does that make it easy for the potential interested investor, but it allows Merit Capital to have us easily update their projects.
The second is ifed2009.org, an online resource for an international medical symposium that took place in Vegas this past summer. We implemented XML on their program section, so attendees could search the presentation lineup by speaker name or by presentation name. Again, XML made it easy for the web audience to find what they’re looking for, but also made it easy for us to update content—if a presentation time changed, we only had to change it in one place instead of two. This goes a long way toward saving hours and dollars in the long run.
XML isn’t for every site, but if you’re looking at that sweet spot somewhere between five and 100 data entries, it’s definitely worth a closer look.
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