XML Companion, The, Third Edition

Presenting XML

The emphasis that the XML philosophy places on content rather than formatting makes it suitable for many diverse applications, including data interchange. But the absence of formatting information in this philosophy is an issue when an XML document is intended for human consumption. Consider the following example XML fragment; only an XML expert should ever see the tags in this sample (and, even then, perhaps only to correct an error in the tagging):

<title>An example of style</title>
<intro>This example shows how important style is
to material intended to be read.</intro>
<para>This is a <em>normal</em> paragraph.</para>
<warning><para>Styles are important!</para></warning>

To present this sample, it is clearly not sufficient ...