XML and SQL: Developing Web Applications

A Brief Example

For convenience, let's say that I want to keep track of books by ISBN. ISBNs are convenient because they provide a unique numbering scheme for books. Let's take the previous example of the book references marked up by ISBN:

<document id="1">Homer's <book isbn="0987-2343">Odyssey</book> is a revered relic
of the ancient world.</document>

I've added <document id="1"> and </document> tags around the body of my document so each document can uniquely identify itself. Each XML document I write has an ID number, which I've designated should be in a tag named “document” that wraps around the entire document. Again, remember that I'm just making these tags up. They're not a documented standard; they're just being used for the purpose ...