XML & CSS.

XML is extended markup language and CSS is cascading style sheets. I picked up reference books on CSS and I hope to learn them to be able to do a few things. Those of you who work with blogger and have looked at your template may or may not know what is going on with all the code. The code you see is XML.

XML lets a web-author create their own tags. Those tags then have special meaning to programs that read them and then they know what to do with the data within those tags. HTML tags are strictly formatting, that is to say control font size, color, create tables and the like. They give no clue as to what is between them.

XML on the other hand gives programs reading them as to what the information in between the tags is. Cascading Style Sheets is one way a web-author can dictate how the XML should be displayed and in fact it works with regular HTML as well. One can alter the way standard HTML tags are rendered with CSS.

I am just learning about these two web languages and am going to concentrate on CSS. The other book picked up is a reference on PHP and MySQL. Both by O'Reilly.