Development and Maintenance of XML-Based Versus HTML-Based Websites: A Case Study
This addresses the problem of website maintenance efficiency for web developers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing comparisons of markup languages.
The study compared the space efficiency of XML-based versus HTML-based websites by designing two experimental sites and incrementally updating them with the same data, finding that XML uses extra tags that increase space usage while HTML requires formatting updates with new content.
HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) has been the primary tool for designing and developing web pages over the years. Content and formatting information are placed together in an HTML document. XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a markup language for documents containing semi-structured and structured information. XML separates formatting from the content. While websites designed in HTML require the formatting information to be included along with the new content when an update occurs, XML does not require adding format information as this information is separately included in XML stylesheets (XSL) and need not be updated when new content is added. On the other hand, XML makes use of extra tags in the XML and XSL files which increase the space usage. In this study, we design and implement two experimental websites using HTML and XML respectively. We incrementally update both websites with the same data and record the change in the size of code for both HTML and XML editions to evaluate the space efficiency of these websites.