Re: [Bug-gnupedia] just HTML??

[Joakim Ziegler]

On Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 02:06:10PM -0800, Tom Chance wrote:
>> The main idea is that a complete article will have
>> many elements, such as 
>> title, sections, paragraphs, quotes, mathematical
>> equations, drawings, 
>> graphs, charts, video clips, sound clips, (such as
>> an article on bird 
>> songs), links, a bibliography/list of works cited,
>> revision history, 
>> comments, ranking (votes), and such things... I
>> don't see that fitting in 
>> one HTML document.
 
> Obviously. But even so, XML isn't the only way to
> store all the information. Looking away from the web
> for a second, how would you usually store large
> amounts of info on a computer? In a database of
> course! So why not here too, with w web database that
> can be easily interpreted by perl and displayed in
> simple HTML form. mySQL is a better solution than XML.

This discussion of databases versus XML is ill-advised. Databases can not
organize content in the same way as a markup language (how would you make
things like paragraph breaks represented in a DB schema?)

However, things can be XMl and then stored in or indexed by a database. A
good way to do this is to make sure the entire DB is reconstructable from the
plain XML files, and use the DB for speed of access, searching, etc.

-- 
Joakim Ziegler - Ximian web monkey - address@hidden - address@hidden
  FIX sysop - free software coder - FIDEL & Conglomerate developer
         http://www.avmaria.com/ - http://www.ximian.com/