XML Data Islands in Web Pages

I get an e-zine called asp.netNOW from aspnetPRO.com.  Today, there was an article about using XML data islands in Web pages that I wanted to pass onto you. You may not know that Internet Explorer provides an XML element that you can use to embed XML directly into an HTML page. I've always been fascinated by this element because on the surface it seems useless.  Just putting XML data inside the XML element doesn't cause the data to show up in a Web page.  Instead, you have to use it as a data source.  That's where the real action starts.

In his article, Exploring Data Islands, Don Kiely explains how to use the XML element in the simplest terms I've ever seen.  He shows how to use the XML element to embed the XML data directly into an HTML page and how to use the XML element to reference an external XML page where the data is stored.  Then he shows how to make that data show up on the page.  Whichever way you prefer, this article is a great starter for understanding this little-used and little-understood element.

At the end of the article Kiely makes a comment about ASP.NET, but don't be fooled.  You don't need to use ASP.NET to use Internet Explorer XML data islands.  The XML element has been part of Internet Explorer since IE 4.0 and is in no way dependent on ASP.NET.  However, I will acknowledge that ASP.NET (and, in fact, the entire .NET Framework) does make working with XML data easier, so if XML is your thing, take a look at Kiely's article AND ASP.NET.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 12, 2004
  There is some good sample code from my Chapter in the Glasshaus 'XML for the Web' book that provides details on how to do this in a cross browser fashion too...
• Anonymous
  August 17, 2004
  This is a very powerful technique when combined also with client side XSL. I have used data islands to store xml/xsl. Beware of long element/attribute names within the data island as they will quickly increase the size of a page...