In this article we learned what XML is, what it can be used for, and developed a Perl script to retrieve and display the contents of HTML embedded XML tags. We also developed a script that gathers news headlines from an XML file and creates an HTML news summary.

Now that we've had a small taste of embedded XML and Perl, I hope you will begin to think of new ways to use XML on your Web site. I believe that the power of Perl and flexibility of XML are the right combination to bring the Web out of its infancy and into a new era of information technology. In future articles, we will discuss the use of XML for Web site management in more detail.

xml-fetch.pl View source | Try it This script retrieves a file from the Web, queries it for a specified list of comma delimited tags, and displays the tag name, attributes, and content.

inet-news.pl View source | Try it This script retrieves the top-news headlines from http://www.internetnews.com and builds a news summary from the results.