php and xml (1 Viewer)

[jamesmor]

I'm currently using PHP to pull data from a MySQL database and then display on a webpage using HTML.

I've been reading about instead of displaying it using HTML, actually creating an XML document using PHP and displaying that instead.

Where I'm having the problem at is the question "Why?"

Why would I do this, and what benefit would it provide me?

Thanks for any input on this!

James

 

[carmelmonteverdeinn]

PHP is an open-source, reflective programming language. Originally designed as a high-level tool for producing dynamic web content, PHP is used mainly in server-side applications.
Read about the evolution of PHP at the first reference.
The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language for creating special-purpose markup languages, capable of describing many different kinds of data. In other words XML is a way of describing data and an XML file can contain the data too, as in a database. It is a simplified subset of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of data across different systems, particularly systems connected via the Internet. Languages based on XML (for example, Geography Markup Language (GML), RDF/XML, RSS, Atom, MathML, XHTML, SVG, and MusicXML) are defined in a formal way, allowing programs to modify and validate documents in these languages without prior knowledge of their form.
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[bparker1084]

PHP is a powerful scripting language that fits gracefully into HTML and puts the tools for creating dynamic websites in the hands of the people. XML is easy to read and has a nice tree structure, which can be easily interpreted.