Development and Maintenance of XML-Based Versus HTML-Based Websites: A Case Study

TL;DR

This study compares the development and maintenance of websites built with HTML and XML, focusing on space efficiency and update processes through a case study of two experimental websites.

Contribution

It provides an empirical comparison of HTML and XML-based websites, highlighting differences in update procedures and space usage.

Findings

XML websites require less frequent updates to formatting information.

XML-based sites show increased space usage due to extra tags.

HTML updates involve re-including formatting data, unlike XML.

Abstract

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.