Extensible Markup Language (XML)

[beingchinmay]

Right out of the box, you can query FMS with a special HTTP URL syntax, which will return raw XML from the live FileMaker database. Sometimes, this raw XML will be good enough for your needs, but most times you are going to want to transform the XML into some other text-based format, be it HTML, comma delimited, iCalendar, vCard, or another flavor of XML.

There are a bunch of ways to transform XML, but the most common in the FileMaker world are



. Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT)—You can place XSLT files on the FileMaker server that will convert the default FileMaker XML to any other text-based format you choose. I think this is a great solution for things like RSS feeds, or web services, but I wouldn’t want to build a website with XSLT. Then again, I am not a whiz with XSLT. If you are, please have at it. You might think it’s the bee’s knees.
. PHP—If you are already a PHP rock star, you could make an XML request to the FMS machine (maybe with file_get_contents, or curl) and then parse the resulting XML with PHP’s built-in XML-handling functions.

[taniag]

Hundreds of document formats utilize XML, including RSS, Atom, SOAP, SVG, and XHTML. XML-based formats are used in Microsoft Office (Office Open XML), OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice (OpenDocument), and Apple's iWork, in communication protocols (e.g. XMPP).

[RH-Calvin]

Extensible Markup Language is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The World Wide Web Consortium's XML 1.0 Specification of 1998 and several other related specifications—all of them free open standards—define XML.