Introduction to XML

This one-day course introduces the eXtensible Markup Language, or XML, including basic grammar and XML validation using DTDs or XML Schema. Students learn to read and to hand-write XML well-formed XML documents, and then proceed to modeling concepts, first learning the basic DTD language and then studying namespaces and XML Schema. The course closes with a chapter on important XML-related technology, including XPath, XSLT, SAX or DOM parsing, and SOAP-based Web services.

The module presents what might be called “Pure XML” — by which we mean two things. Firstly, everything in the module is based strictly on W3C specifications, without any vendor-specific extensions. Secondly, no knowledge of any particular programming language or other external technology is required to participate fully in the module. Thus the hands-on exercises, and the knowledge that is developed, are portable and applicable to any XML authoring or development effort.

Learning Objectives

• Understand the broad influence of XML on emerging software architectures.
• Write well-formed XML documents to express simple or complex document content.
• Write DTDs to set rules for XML document validation.
• Write valid XML documents with internal and/or external document type definitions.
• Understand the limitations of DTDs in expressing document and object designs and in setting strict validation rules.
• Read and write XML using namespaces to import type information and to partition the XML namespace.
• Use XML Schema to validate XML documents.
• U
  derstand the roles of XPath, XSLT, parsing, and Web services in the broader scope of XML technology in software applications