XML Readings

“An Introduction to the Extensible Markup Language (XML)”

by Martin Bryan of The SGML Centre

You never hear about SGML anymore, does it still exist or is it still relevant?

So, beyond the fact that XML allows you to compound documents, it lets you identify where digital objects appear, how they are controlled, as well as add metadata to a file. It isn’t however a set of tags like HTML, but a way of using tags predefined by some type of governing body.

I get how you define attributes and tags, but where do definitions live? That must be the processing instructions and hyperlink to a document type declaration.

“Extending Your Markup,” Andre Bergholz

SGML is what lets you write define the structure.

Is what was described in the previous article DTD or schema?

The stylesheet sounds pretty interesting – follow up on it.

“A survey of XML standards: Part 1,” Uche Ogbuji

Catalogs: instructions for how an XML processor revolves entity identifiers into documents.

Namespaces: a mechanism for universal element and attribute naming. Can be identical to another language if you define it differently here.

Base: associates elements with UROs

Inclusions (XInclude): a system to merge XML documents.

Inforset: a way of describing objects with special properties.

Pointer: defines a language that can be used to refer to fragments of an XML document.

XLink: framework for expressing links in XML

Relax NG vs. W3C XML Schema vs. Schematron: Competing schemas, who won?

W3C Schema tutorial

A tutorial on schemas from W3C, nuff’ said.