What's the xml link for on top of the page?

[chunlou]

Just wondering. Maybe I'm dull and somehow unable to find an answer in any Q&A, but what's the XML link on top of the page for, especially since the XML file doesn't contain the entire content of the whole page and on some nodes (like Newest Nodes) there isn't really much "body" of content in the XML file, except for some "titles"?

Thanks.

[ajt]

It's there in case you or anyone else wishes to grab the data from a node in a nice marked-up manner, without having to parse somewhat messy HTML. A nice concise chunk of XML, should be easy to do something with in Perl, there are plenty of XML tools to parse it with, and plenty of nice ways of re-displaying the data.

Let your imagination run wild!

• HTTP::GHTTP to get the XML
• XML::LibXML to parse the XML
• XML::LibXSLT to transform the XML
• ....

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ajt

[valdez]

There are a lot of those XML feeds, they are listed at What XML generators are currently available on PerlMonks?. A list of programs that use them is available at PerlMonks Related Scripts.

Have fun :) Valerio

[theorbtwo]

For most nodes, the XML view contains a decent view of the actual content of the node. However, it doesn't work quite like you might want for nodes where the user-visible content of the node doesn't match up with what's actually in the DB. Fortunately, for most of the major superdocs, there's a xml ticker seperate from the XML view.

Unfortunately, the XML view is set up to only give the data in the DB in a fairly literal translation, and to appear for all nodes, regardless of if the XML view will give useful information.

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