[XML-SIG] Questions about this application

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Shawn Carraway
|
| We chose XML for building the database because it is also open
| source and we believe it is the future of the WWW.

First, XML is not open source.  XML is just a standardized syntax,
it's not a piece of software, although most XML software is open
source.

Also, XML might not be a good choice for a database system since XML
in itself has very little of what a database system generally offers.
The data model of XML is also rather different from most others, which
means that it may not fit your data very well.

I'm writing this as general information and advice, just so you know.
 
| 1) First, can this be done?

Well, you haven't said what you want to do, just what technologies you
want to use. :) Those technologies fit well together, but whether they
can do what you want to do I have no idea.
 
| 2) Is SaX only available for Linux? 

At the moment, SAX is available in Java, Python and Perl, which means
that it is available pretty much anywhere. Note that the XML-SIG
package for Python contains SAX 1.0, and that we are working on SAX
2.0 for Python.

| 3) What browser do you use to view XML with Linux?  I use Netscape,
| but the only browser I know that supports XML is IE5 - not available
| for Linux, and Amaya - the W3C browser.

Will this system only be available to users running Linux? If so, it
sounds like a very strange requirement to me for a web-based system.
Web-based systems are, after all, among the very few kinds of systems
that are truly platform-independent.

Why do you want to send XML to the browser? All browsers support HTML,
so why not use that instead?

BTW, Amaya does not support arbitrary XML, only XHTML and MathML.

| 4) Can you direct me to more resources - like a user's group, maybe
| - or a mailing list that would not flame stupid questions? 

Welcome to the XML-SIG. :-)

| We did a database project with ASP this summer and while there was a
| lot of documentation on the web, it would have been nice to have
| someone to ask questions, especially since our project differed
| somewhat from what we read on the web.

The XML-L mailing list may also be a useful forum, but I think you
will find many more people familiar with Python here.

See <URL: http://www.xmlinfo.com/lists/ > for a list of mailing lists.

--Lars M.