XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

What This Book Covers

There are thousands of formally established XML applications from the W3C and other standards bodies, such as OASIS and the Object Management Group. There are even more informal, unstandardized applications from individuals and corporations, such as Microsoft’s Channel Definition Format and John Guajardo’s Mind Reading Markup Language. This book cannot cover them all, any more than a book on Java could discuss every program that has ever been or might ever be written in Java. This book focuses primarily on XML itself. It covers the fundamental rules that all XML documents and authors must adhere to, from a web designer who uses SMIL to add animations to web pages to a C++ programmer who uses SOAP to exchange serialized objects with a remote database.

This book also covers generic supporting technologies that have been layered on top of XML and are used across a wide range of XML applications. These technologies include:

XLink

An attribute-based syntax for hyperlinks between XML and non-XML documents that provide the simple, one-directional links familiar from HTML, multidirectional links between many documents, and links between documents to which you don’t have write access.

XSLT

An XML application that describes transformations from one document to another in either the same or different XML vocabularies.

XPointer

A syntax for URI fragment identifiers that selects particular parts of the XML document referred to by the URI—often used in conjunction with an XLink. ...