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XML course notes
Submitted by
AliaK
on Sat, 25/11/2006 - 02:47
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XML course
http://www.vtc.com/products/introtoxml.htm
self describing markup language
XSL - extensible stylesheet language
XSLT
translations
query against original data
XSL-FO
formatting options
will take over from css
XPATH
language on how to write the queries
lets us parse through the documents
XLINK
link to a document
link back to original doc
link within current document
XPOINTER
link to a position in a file
eg like a href # in html
refer to
www.w3.org
to see specs on each of these + new developments
XML basics
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
definition and spec version
attributes such as:
encoding="unicode"
unicode is default if encoding character set is not specified
standalone="no"
means this doc cannot be viewed on it's own. a translation document is required also to interpret this doc
standalone="yes"
means the browser can display this document as is without requiring another document to translate it
<? ?> is a processing statement, the application or browser will process this instruction
<people>
root element
<husband>Mark</husband>
</people>
xml editors
notepad / text editor
XML Spy
www.altova.com
XML Writer
www.xmlwriter.com
editiX
www.editix.com
morphon xml editor
www.morphon.com
emile (mac)
www.in-progress.com/emile
5 basic rules to make a well formed document
1. tags are case sensitive
2. opening tags must have closing tags
3. tags must be properly nested
4. attribute values require quotes
5. root element required
element
an element is a complete description of a piece of data
consists of the start tag, the data and the end tag
empty element
eg <br></br>
or <br />
attributes
eg <husband employed="yes">
could also represent this using elements rather than as an attribute:
<husband>
<name>Mark</name>
<age>45</age>
<employed>yes</employed>
</husband>
values
make each element represent one piece of data/value only
special characters
common symbols
< <
> >
" "
' '
& &
use decimal values
& = &
CR, LF, TAB from version xml 1.0
xml version 1.1 can use all the ascii codes except for NUL
comments
<!-- this is a comment -->
comments may be displayed or dropped from the browser or application. this is correct as per the spec
schema
describes the structure of the document
usually the schema is a separate document
what data is allowed
what data is required
how data is organised
checks the structure of the data not the actual value of the data
DTD or XSD
DTD - document type definition
not XML based
de facto standard
defines the XML document structure
defines what elements can/must appear
defines what order the elements must be in
information about the data the elements contain
element attributes information / requirements
DTD does not determine what the root element is
DTD does not show the number of instances of elements
DTD does not include the data types
DTD does not include the symantic meaning of an element
eg whether data is a name or a date
can be defined inline or in a separate document (external)
DTD elements
elements are the allowed / required tags
created with an element declaration
<!ELEMENT ElementName Type>
4 types of elements
empty tag - does not contain content
element-only
contains only child elements
mixed
combination of child elements and character data
any
any content allowed
DTD element options
* means can appear zero or more times
+ means one or more times
? means zero or one time
| means or
no symbol means the child element must appear only once
XML Schema
XSD - XML Schema Definition
RELAX NG
W3C XML Schema Language
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