XML based website - how to create?

Question

I would like to create an XML-based website. I want to use XML files as datasources since it is a kind of online directory site. Can someone please give me a starting point? Are there any good online resources that I can refer to? I am pretty comfortable with ASP and JavaScript.

Answer 1

If you cannot or don't wish to store your data in XHTML format, then XSLT is definitely the way you want to go. By its very definition, it is a transformation language designed to transform data from one format to another. Because this is it's focus, it provides power, speed and flexibility you won't find in many other solutions. It will also ensure you output standards compliant (X)HTML as it's impossible to do otherwise (well, not without deliberately going out of your way to botch it).

MSXML allows you to do XSL transformations for use in Classic ASP - see this page for an example.

ZVON.org is also a great XSLT reference.

Answer 2

Hey, here's an idea - xhtml is xml, after all, so if you can define the format of the xml files, just create browser-friendly xhtml to begin with.

Otherwise I'm sure there are XML parsing libraries for ASP and you can look into XSLT (which is cool to learn, but a bit more of a challenge).