Relational Tables and structured documents

Peter Murray-Rust (peter@ursus.demon.co.uk)
Thu, 19 Mar 1998 12:11:15

I have been spending the last two weeks working on a molecular application
which essentially consists of relational tables. The application is
largely hierarchical (a protein molecule) so that it benefits from being
recast into structured document form. I have therefore found it useful to
create routines which generate nodes in a tree as a result of joining tables.

I expect this is a common operation (e.g. creation of orgCharts from
relational tables). XML would seem to provide a useful approach,
especially client-side (most humans don't read relational tables very
well). Excuse my ignorance, but is this a sufficiently generic application
that there are well-understood rules for it and is there scope for a
generic XML approach?

P.
Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
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