XML-powered Exhibit: A Case Study of JSON & XML Coexistence

XML-powered Exhibit: A Case Study of JSON & XML Coexistence

JSON and XML are often presented as mutually exclusive data exchange representations each with their own set of advantages. XML is highly expressive, widely supported, and a placeholder for a whole spectrum of technological capabilities. JSON’s syntax is light-weight, intuitive, and as a subset of Javascript, supported in almost every web browser natively. The goal of XML as the flag-bearing data exchange format for the web has fallen quite short of the original goal and instead imperative scripting has become the primary mechanism for rich dynamic content on the web.

However, light-weight data publishing frameworks such as Simile Exhibit demonstrate an alternative, declarative means for driving dynamic content JSON. This presentation demonstrates how web authors can have their cake and eat it too by extracting JSON from XML to facilitate the use of frameworks (such as Exhibit) that understand JSON natively and can be deployed with ease on a majority of web browsers.

Such an extraction can be facilitated rather easily with XSLT in such a way that dynamic, interactive, and highly portable user interfaces can be served to and driven solely from the client-side, leaving the heavy-weight lifting to an XML-oriented database. The primary value of such a deployment approach is in emphasizing the relative strengths of XML and JSON in tandem rather than opposition.