XML

[rowyn]

For those of you familiar with using xml --

I want to be able to code an xml form which will do basic mathmatical operations and store data. For exmple, my end user would see a form that said "Enter X" and "Enter Y", and after the user entered X & Y, the page would calculate X/Y, display the result, and then store everything.

Now, my actual question is not "how do I do this?" but "how annoying is it to learn enough xml to know how to do this sort of thing?" It seems like a simple enough kind of thing, but I've not actually coded in xml before. I will have access to an exceedingly simple xml form designer which will do the "enter and store X&Y" part, but not do operations based on the data entered. I kinda want to just manually edit the designer's code and add the other stuff, but I'm not sure if this falls in the category of "browse webpages on xml coding and figure it out" or "get an xml book and figure it out" or "1-day training course" or "college class". Suggestions?

Comments

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

One note: XML, in and of itself, isn't a language per se. There are languages that make use of XML, both for sheer data representation or even for their syntax (e.g., XSLT, which is a language of sorts for taking XML and changing it into... more XML), but at its heart XML isn't a language, it's a data (and metadata) format. My broader question is 'what exactly are you trying to accomplish?' From your description it sounds like what you're after might actually be Javascript rather than XML, but it's impossible to say for sure without understanding the broad task.

[caffeinewabbit.livejournal.com]

What shaterri said - xml is a format for data storage, not a programming language. The form generator probably stores its forms in xml, and might have a special tag set that it interprets to generate interactive forms, but that'd be unique to the generator program and not inherent to xml itself.

[jurann.livejournal.com]

You know people who are (apparently) better and more knowledgeable than me on the topic, so I'll decline to restate what has already been said.