XML for the sake of it

XML is a wondeful thing, but I think sometimes it can be all to easy to make life difficult for myself, by attempting to do things in XML which would be much more straightforward if I did them with a database and then output XML as needed.

For example a couple of things I will be adding to this site are a “last updated” menu, showing which pages have been recently updated on this “multi-blog” site and a bookmarks section – a central place to keep my bookmarks rather than importing them from one web browser to another. Both of these could be done purely using ASP and XML, and i’m sure if I look around I will find some examples, but I know I can knock something up with an access database, even writing everything out as XML in half the time.

The other thing is that the ASP I would use if it was purely XML wouldn’t be portable in the slightest if I wanted to move it all to, say , PHP, whereas any SQL queries I use for a database version probably would be.