How to feed an xml database with tags obtained thru html forms?

Question

I'm not a programmer. I begin with XML, HTML forms and XSLT on Mac.

I plan to use a form to post short texts in a XHTML page and invite end users to add some annotations to the said text. The users would select a specific part of the text posted and each annotation would stand for one specific chain of characters.

My goal is to consolidate the tags obtained from various user's annotations to one XML "knowledge base" containing the original text with all the revision indicators. Then I plan to use XSLT sheets to product various reports based on the tags obtained.

My two questions are:

1. Am I dreaming? Is it really possible to do that with XML, XFORMS , XSLT without using Java, PHP, Ajax or other seasoned programmer's tools?

2. What should be my focus for further explorations aiming in that direction? Which schema, events, sequences should I study?

Answer 1

XML is a storage format for structured data. It has no dynamic properties at all.

XForms is merely a specification of how to represent structured forms in XML, it has no dynamic properties either.

While XSLT is a programming language, it does not really have the capabilities to function as a web application stack. It usually works in conjunction with some kind of "outer" programming language that does HTTP handling, file IO and application logic.

You will not get around programming for this idea of yours. At least one of the "seasoned programmer's tools" on the server and probably a lot of JavaScript on the client will be necessary.

Answer 2

You're going to need some programmatic component to consolidate the annotations into the XML knowledge base. I don't see how you can avoid that.