XML and PHP

Introduction

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Unless you’ve been doing a Rip Van Winkle for the past few years, you’ve heard about PHP and XML.

Probably not in the same context, I’ll grant you—one is, after all, a programming language for the web, whereas the other is a standard toolkit for describing data. Individually, they’re both long-time sweethearts of the notoriously fickle web community—PHP for its rapid application development capabilities and XML for its capability to make data more useful by attaching descriptive tags to it.

Although there is no shortage of information on either of these two technologies individually, there are very few resources that ...