XML, XSL, XHTML, etc.

Several months back, well probably last year in fact, I borrowed a couple of books from the library on XML, XHTML and the related standards with a view to revamping a few websites I look after. Good intentions, but lack of time meant I did little more than scan through the chapters and read a few sections before returning the books. Fast forwarding to the end of last week and this weekend and I’m back considering the long overdue overhaul of some of my websites – particularly my company one as it will be hitting the Yellow Pages shortly (yay, lookout for ‘Linux’ in the Yellow Pages!). Anyway, I did a bit of searching and reading around on sites like the W3C, W3Schools and a selection of other hits that came up and seemed to get nowhere. They all concentrate so hard on explaining what XML is, why it is good and a few references to the fact that XHTML brings XML to the web via updates to HTML, but none of them give any decent examples of how to actually use it. It all makes sense to me, or appears to, in concept. It all sounds very nice and I’m itching to get going, but whereas I could pick up a text editor and knock out some HTML pages quite quickly back in the days of Netscape 1.x; then as things progressed add in the new features, a bit of Javascript when needed and tidy things up with a bit of CSS; this next stage seems shrouded in a complete lack of any practical examples.

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Planet bug

By the looks of things there is a bug in the Planet software that HantsLUG is using. I’ve just been tidying up my posts to ensure that my HTML is correct. The fact that each individual entry is then stitched together left me with a few teething problems unfortunately.

Anyway, all is now working fine, but in the process I had to escape some sections of quoted HTML. This left me with a whole load of < and > characters converted to &#60; and &#62; entries in there. This is fine except when it occurs in the title line of the RSS feed that Planet works with. In this case the first & of the escape secuence is escaped itself, so you end up with &#60; and &#62; actually showing up in the text because the first & has been replaced by &amp; (and you should see how this entry looks in raw HTML!).