True Seperation of Presentation & Content with  XML

Web standards books praise the idea of separating presentation from content. Unfortunately doing so is harder said than done in the professional world. When I begin working on a re-design I usually find myself spending countless hours re-formatting content, so what’s the point? If a client wants specific information laid out as an unordered list (or outline) one day and tabular data the next you’ll find yourself rebuilding the pages structure.

The best solution to this ongoing probably is to utilize XML to describe the content as best as possible. The one problem with this approach is that parsing that XML into usable code is usually a big pain in the ass. With PHP5’s implementation of the SimpleXML object parsing XML is finally as simple as it should be.

This is the best way to handle web content in my opinion. The advantages as I see them are:

• Store your content in one central location, even it is used in multiple places throughout a site
• Write your content once using the most semantic markup of all, XML
• Loop through tags to make styling repeated content a breeze (e.g. Press Releases page)
• Use your content with different technologies. Create RSS feeds, supply it to other domains or use it with Flash

Using the SimpleXML object

Let’s get our hands dirty and see how to parse an XML file with SimpleXML.

XML

  

    August 26
    2008
    pdf/consumer-brochure.pdf
    New press release!
    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua...
  

PHP

 
$press = simpleXML_load_file("press.xml"); 
foreach($press as $articles) { 
?>

  
title ?>
  
description ?>
  
Published date ?>, year ?>

  
New press release!
  
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua...
  
Published August 26, 2008