Programming systems these days are working on many different machines and using many different technologies and programming languages. XML is a modern effort employed to allow communication between all these different systems.

In Introduction to XML course we will cover XML syntax and the most important XML concepts: well-formed and valid XML, DTD, displaying XML with CSS, Namespaces.

Outline

What is XML?

• Introduction to XML
• Short history of markup languages
• How does XML differ from HTML?
• How XML can be used?
• Getting your tools ready: XML browsers
• Well-formed XML document
• What is a well-formed XML document?
• XML declaration
• XML elements
• XML attributes
• General XML syntax

XML document

• Introduction to DTD - Document Type Definition.
• What is a valid XML document?
• Document Type Declaration
• Element declarations
• The internal DTD
• The external DTD

XML Attributes

• What is an attribute?
• Attribute declaration
• Attribute types
• Attribute defaults
• Enumerated attributes
• Attributes and CSS

Displaying XML documents

• HTML versus XML
• Introduction to CSS - Cascading Style Sheets
• CSS 1, CSS 2

XML Namespaces

• What is an XML namespace?
• Namespace syntax
• Declaring namespaces
• Attributes and namespaces

Document modelling techniques

• Analysis of document structure
• Re-use an old schema or create a new one?
• Element or Attribute
• Context, wrapping and granularity XML Schema Basics
• Deining Simple Elements
• Deining Complex Elements
• Deining Attributes
• Data types
• Creating reusable types

Applying XML

• XML and the web
• XML in standalone applications
• Introducing Web Services
• Introducing the Document Object Model (DOM)
• Introducing AJAX