XML has limitations?

[spectacularstuff]

I am in the middle of learning XML.During my studies here at the w3schools XML tutorials, I decided to write a php program that will convert a tab delimited text froogle feed to an XML document.However, I have run into an issue with attempting to get the data islands to show up.I checked the schema and HTML and fixed all errors there.I reduced the size of the XML file and the data islands showed up.Does XML have file size or character limitations?Please check out the following URLs:http://www.spectacularstuff.com/xml/froogle.htmlWorks no problem704kb12198 lineshttp://www.spectacularstuff.com/xml/froogle2.htmlDoes not work1.72MB43,052 linesCan someone explain this to me?What is the use of XML if it has a small limitation like that?Thanks,WayneGift Baskets

[boen_robot]

OK, this Data Island is officially the largest one I've seen . That's what I call pushing Data Islands to their limits .Well, as far as I'm aware of, there shouldn't be a file size limit, though this XML is pretty large.There are character limitations though. But not about their numbers, but the characters themselves. Only valid UTF-8 characters are allowed. XML 1.1 allows for all valid UTF-16 characters, meaning less restrictions on this.I advise you to find another method... be it XSLT or PHP... just not Data Islands to display this data. Data Islands are useless anyway.

[spectacularstuff]

OK, this Data Island is officially the largest one I've seen . That's what I call pushing Data Islands to their limits .Well, as far as I'm aware of, there shouldn't be a file size limit, though this XML is pretty large.There are character limitations though. But not about their numbers, but the characters themselves. Only valid UTF-8 characters are allowed. XML 1.1 allows for all valid UTF-16 characters, meaning less restrictions on this.I advise you to find another method... be it XSLT or PHP... just not Data Islands to display this data. Data Islands are useless anyway.

Okay,If I have this correct then the error could be coming from the fact that I am using an encoding other than UTF-8 & UTF-16. I wish W3Schools would mention this in their tutorials... lol. That is where I picked up the ISO encoding from to begin with.Next, XML Data Islands being useless. They have some pretty neat uses from what I have seen across the net however I agree when I attempt to think of business related scenarios that I can utilize them in, I do fall short. Nevertheless, it is in the tutorial so I'll learn it anyway.I would utilize PHP to show all of that stuff to a webpage anyway however I would like to be able to store it in an XML file instead of a database for ease of use and faster data transfer.More questions if you don't mind:1. What are the benefits of XSLT over XML. I was under the impression that they worked together?2. There is something happening in my XML document that I cannot explain. Perhaps you can shed some light for me. Look at either of the XML documents:http://www.spectacularstuff.com/xml/froogle.xmlhttp://www.spectacularstuff.com/xml/froogle2.xmlBoth of the documents have a space right after the price element. I do not know what is causing this. If you view the source code, there is no space. What can cause this?Thanks,Wayne

[boen_robot]

Actually, I was wrong about the character encodings. After looking into Wikipedia, I can say that in XML 1.0 any Unicode 2.0 character is acceptable. This includes the UTF-8, UTF-16 and other charsets. I bet your ISO encoding is also allowed.Where "across the net" have you seen Data Islands being useful? The fact they only work in IE is probably the first reason to hate them.And your questions:1. Let's get something straight. XML is a language for defining languages, usually used as a data storage. Data Islands is a method for processing XML documents. So when I said

I advise you to find another method... be it XSLT or PHP... just not Data Islands

I meant another method for processing XML data, not another method to store data.XSLT is one such way, so your impression that they work together is absolutely correct. However, any other language, like PHP, ASP(.NET), Cold Fusion, JSP, C++, C#, JAVA, etc. can also manipulate XML documents in order to display and/or use their contents.2. What space? As you said, there's no such thing in the source. If that's just IE's representation of the XML document... no need to worry at all. It all depends how YOU will be using the data, not how the browser will attempt to read it on it's own.