Hi Sarah
The Web is increasingly being used as a repository for (structured)
data, which can be processed by software, as opposed to unstructured HTML
resources, which is intended for viewing.
You should be looking to use XML to structure the data.
You should be looking at XML Schemas to define the structure of the data.
You should be looking at applications which can process this structured
data - you'll have to talk to your data producers about this.
You may wish to transform the XML into HTML to allow users to view the
data (or perhaps not). As an example, the RSS XML file at:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/rss/ukoln.xml
(which can be best viewed as XML in an XML browser such as IE5)
is transformed into HTML and embedded into our UKOLN home page at:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
Brian
--------------------------------------------------------------
Brian Kelly
UKOLN
University of Bath
BATH
BA2 7AY
Email: [log in to unmask]
Phone: (+44) 1225 323943
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sarah Agarwal" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2001 11:41 AM
Subject: are web pages full of data usable?
The Environment Agency produces a lot of data and the producers of this data
are requesting that it's uploaded onto web pages. My feeling is that pages
of numbers are not usable and that the data should be held in a database and
pulled out when the database is queried. Does anyone have any advice,
opinions, experience, etc, that could help me get my head around this
particular issue?
thanks
Sarah Agarwal, Intranet Manager, Environment Agency
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