Jon Udell says the Secrets of the XML Gods are that they are cobbling together XML by hand. He cites Sean McGrath’s blog and Tim Bray’s XML Is Too Hard for Programmers essays. Dave Winer retorts that his tool of choice has a good XML compiler built in.
I’m stuck with a similar conundrum, only I am just starting out. Up until this point, I’ve cobbled together XML using the CursorToXML() function built in to Visual FoxPro, but that’s only suitable for flat, repetitious XML. With the FoxCentral RSS File, I just manually wrapped header and footer elements around transformed XML. But with some other projects, like SMBMeta, I need to create truly hierarchical, multiple one-to-zero-or-many structures, and CursorToXML isn’t built for that. I’m looking for a simple “Hello, World” example of creating a document with XMLDOM or another tool, adding attributes, elements and nodes to it. Anyone got one handy?