I'm looking to develop a XML/HTML search page that I can place on my website. My website contains a lot of stories so I'd like to put general information into an XML file such as the stories' title, length, summary, and link. Then I'd like for my users to be able to come to my site, go to a search page or field where they can put in key words and search the XML file. Then if they get a return, the XML Query will give back an HTML page with the story's information and link.

Is something like that possible? Or is there a better way to do it? Any help would be awesome!
Thank you,
Red

Yes, it's possible,but not with HTML, you'll have to use some kind of scripting solution - like PHP or .NET - to achieve it.

I think you could use an XSLT to do it natively in the browser. You'd have to send down the entire XML file, and write up a transform, stylesheet, and XPath query. I don't know how you'd get a variable in there from any kind of user input, though ... that might need some type of scripting, ideally server side. But modern browsers can do a lot with XML.

I appreciate the help, y'all! That's what I was afraid of! The part about storing the information in an XML file is the easy part, but searching it and kicking it back as a HTML page is harder. I'm not sure what else to come up with because trying to do a site search would yield far too many results for my users. Bleh.

Red

I'd recommend PHP 5 (fairly easy to learn) and parsing the XML so that you could output it. Not exactly the easiest project for a noob, though, so be prepared to do lots of reading. If you're talking about 1000's of files, it'd be prudent to index them in some fashion (say through a full index in MySQL).

That's what I was thinking of doing. I know of a webmaster that already has basically what I want. She uses MySQL - ColdFusion - HTML/XML to get the job done. I suppose I can substitute the ColdFusion with PHP to do it...? Right now the files are only about 100, but later I may take on a larger project that'll be by the 1000's.

ColdFusion would likely work. I don't know it, but I'm pretty sure it's a server side language, so you'd be good with it.

Try checking whether your server (if remote) has a cgi script that can you with that. That's what I use on one of my sites. (although the results page looks horrible) mintinit.com