PB138 — Introduction to XML

Introduction to XML

Motivation

Principles

Resources @FI (courses) and elsewhere

XML is a standard by the W3C (http://www.w3.org) consortium prescribing how to create markup languages.

It is therefore a metalanguage.

It is ideologically based on older standards (SGML Structure Generalized Markup Language) — XML can be seen as almost a subset of SGML.

There are several other standards closely related to XML, such as XML Namespaces, XInclude, XML Base, XML Infoset.

These standards together with others ( XSLT, XSL-FO, XHTML, CSS …​) form a "family" of XML standards.

XML is not a specific markup language, it’s a specification determining how the markup languages should look like,

so it is a "meta-language",

conceptually a simplification of the SGML standard to facilitate the creation of parsers (analyzers) and applications.

As each element in an XML document must be closed, the documents need not have a DTD for structure recognition.

XML builds on a successful implementation of SGML - HTML. It has similar characteristics in terms of the focus on the Internet.

Serious discussions are held around binary XML, which should be equivalent representations of the same model as the "text" XML.

original specification (W3C Recommendation) to the W3C XML 1.0: http: //www.w3.org/XML

5th Edition at Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth Edition) (http: //www. w3. org/TR/REC-xml)

XML is 20 - the first spec is now 21 years old (Feb 10, 1998)

XML 1.1 (Second Edition) (http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlll) - changes induced by the introduction of UNICODE 3, easier normalization, the specification of handling procedure for "end of line" characters . XML 1.1 is not bound to specific version of UNICODE, but always on the latest version.

XML Coordination Group intermediate-working group, kind of "interface" between different groups of activities and also externally

XML Core Working Group development of major specifications (XML ) and closely related ones (Namespaces in XML, XML Information Set, XInclude)

Efficient XML Interchange Working Group development of standards for effective exchange of XML data with emphasis on portability and platform independence of the individual products (including eg Binary XML Characterization )

XML Processing Model Working Group working on the definition of a scripting language for XML, the specification operations over XML data

XML Linking Working Group the now defunct group worked on the development of XML Linking Language XLink) and XML Pointer Language (XPointer).

XML Query Working Group is designing the XML Query Language ( XQuery and XPath - together with XSL Working Group)

XML Schema Working Group Prepares specifications of W3C XML Schema to describe the structure, content, or semantics of XML documents.

Neither XML is an "ultimate solution" to all problems of machine data exchange. Development goes on.

For interactive (rich) web applications (RIA) with intensive server-to-client communications, because of easier interpretability and smaller data, the formats such as JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) are used.

YAML is used for handwriting structured data.

These standards will be mentioned during lectures as well. The focus of the course is in XML, derived formats instruments for processing and applications.

Zvon XML Tutorial: http://www.zvon.org/xxl/XMLTutorial/General/

Tutorial ke XML na W3 Schools: http://www.w3schools.com/xml/default.asp

Microsoft XML Tutorial: http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/tutorial/

101 XML Tutorials: http://www.xmll01.com/xml/default.asp

XML Tutorials at Beginners.co.uk: http://tutorials.beginners.co.uk

Tutorials at Developerlife.com: http://developerlife.com

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

XML Startkabel

Zvon — excellent collection of tutorials, on-line references in many languages, hosted in CZ

XML Cover Pages — daily updated collection of links to articles, standards, software, etc. in XML. Best in this category.

OReilly XML.COM — articles, tutorials at a high level

IBM DeveloperWorks, section XML — papers, tutorials, software atd. at a high level

Activities of W3C: http://www.w3.org/XML/Activity - specification of standards, conferences, links to SW, reference tools, links

What is XML? na XML.COM: http: //www.xml.com/pub/a/98/10/guide0.html - one of the intro articles to XML

XML: XML Quick Syntax Reference Card (http://www.mulberrytech.com) - great, simple reference card

Commented version of XML specification at XML.COM (Annotated XML): http://www.xml.com/pub/a/axml/axmlintro.html

XML in Nutshell by E.R.Harold

PA165 Enterprise Java - T. Pitner, P. Adámek, M. Kuba, B. Rossi, F. Nguyen, M. Cupák, M. Briškár

PB029 Electronic document preparation - P. Sojka

PV110 Software electronic publications I - P. Sojka

PV173 Seminary of NLP Lab

IB047 Intro to corpus linguistics and computer lexikography - K. Pala, P. Rychlý

PA105 Technologies of Information Systems II - J. Král

PA154 Corpus Tools - P. Rychlý

PA156 Dialogue System - I. Kopeček

PV174 Lab of Electronic and Multimedia Apps - P. Sojka

PV030 Textual IS - P. Sojka

PV113 SW electronic publications II - P. Sojka