XML: Introduction

Programming Courses

XML is a meta-language for describing markup languages. XML offers the capability to define tags and the structural relationships between them and omits the need for predefined tags. This eliminates the unnecessary restrictions faced when coding in HTML which explains XML?s fast growing popularity. This practical hands-on course is designed to give HTML coders a comprehensive introduction to XML (plus DTD, Namespaces and RSS) and the emerging technologies of Xlink, Xpointer and Xinclude. This two day intensive course can also be taken as a three day course on an individual tuition or private company basis for those with little or no experience of hand coding HTML and CSS.

Course Description

Day one

Introduction
• XML, XHTML and HTML
• Why use XML?
• The Document Object model
• Modelling XML documents
• Well-formed and valid documents

Basic rules of XML
• Elements, Attributes and Values
• XML declaration
• The Root Element
• Adding comments
• Default entities
• Displaying tags as text
• Namespaces

Document Type Definition (DTD)
• Internal DTD
• External DTD
• Personal external DTD
• Public external DTD
• Occurrence operators

Elements and attributes in a DTD
• Defining elements
• Defining an element to contain
- only text
- one child
- a sequence
• Defining choices
• Simple attributes
• Attributes and unique values

Entities and notations in DTDs
• Internal general entities
• Shortcuts for text in external files
• External parameter entities
• Entities for unparsed content
• Embedding unparsed content

Day two

Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
• Push vs Pull technology
• RSS readers
• Transforming your RSS
• Browsers and RSS transformation

An overview of XML schema
• Simple and complex types
• Schema namespaces
• Target location
• Simple schema
• Simple schema’s location
• Annotating schemas
• Validating with schemas

Introduction to XSLT
• Source tree
• Style sheet
• Result tree
• Parsers
• Template rules
• Literals
• Xpath

Building templates
• Looping through your XML document
• Formatting your template
• Template match
• Value-of select
• Extracting attributes
• Formatting tables
• Sorting

Emerging technologies
• Xpointer
• Xinclude

Questions and answers