What happened with the XML WebServices Award on the GotDotNet website? I have submitted my Html2Xml webserivce. I don't expect to win the 25.000 dollar price, an X-box would be nice :-)
The winners would be announced at the Teched in Barcelona (1-5 July 2002). Then this was moved to July 12. It is now August. Nothing has happened. Is there no winner?
Strange!
As you probably know, HTML is a "markup language" that uses "tags" (such as and <br> and <p>) to mark up text for formatting. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is the universal format for structured documents and data on the Web.
Both HTML and XML use <, >, and & to create element and attribute structures. While HTML browsers accept or ignore mangled markup language, XML parsers and applications built on those parsers are less forgiving
The Html2Xml webservice takes an Html text and converts it into an Xml text. Some corrections are done to the Html to make it well-formed Xml.
You can use this webservice to screen scrape a web page and convert it to Xml. The Xml can then be used for further processing.
The Html2Xml is also registered in the UDDI registry.
The Stock Sample Web Service uses the Html2Xml service to retrieve the Finance page of Yahoo. It then searches the Xml, using an XPath expression, for the current value and returns it. Hopefully Yahoo never changes their HTML structure.