Transformation from HTML to XML: Methodology and Tool

Abstract

HTML has been widely used by Web developers due largely to its ease of use. Despite its wide use, HTML has reached its limit as the markup language for the Web. HTML’s use of predefined tags, which serve merely as a presentation tool, has been considered as inflexible in the language. XML has been introduced to overcome the deficiencies of HTML, especially in terms of defining more structural and semantic-based mark-ups. Due to this fact, it is then desirable that the existing HTML pages are transformed into an XML format. In this paper, we present a methodology and a tool for transformation from HTML to XML. The transformation consists of three steps: (i) reformatting HTML pages, (ii) deriving a Web-schema, and (ii) using a mapping tool to do the transformation. In the last step above, we use a mapping tool, which we have built for this purpose. The tool is a semi-automatic tool that takes HTML pages and their Web-schemas, and transforms them into an XML format.