10.7. Using Views to Transform XML Content

The XML processing methods that we have seen so far are very useful for data-centric XML documents. These are documents whose structure is very well-defined. This type of file is commonly seen when the file is modeling some kind of data structure, and is usually used for transferring data between different systems. The TV show example was a good example of this, as the relationships between the various data items in the document were well understood and unlikely to change.

There is another type of XML file, known as narrative-centric. In these files, the data is less well structured. A good example of this kind of document is a book. Although a book will have some high-level structure (table of contents, chapters, appendixes, and index), once you get down to the text in a chapter, the structure is much less defined. A paragraph can contain italic text, bold text, references to footnotes, URLs, and any number of other types of text, all of which will need to be processed differently.