Introduction to XML

What is XML?
a meta language that allows you to
create and format your own document
markups
a method for putting structured data
into a text file; these files are
- easy to read
- unambiguous
- extensible
- platform-independent

Chapter 8 © 2003 by Addison-Wesley, Inc. 2

8.1 Introduction
- The Standard Generalized Markup Language
(SGML) is a meta-markup language which
describes a standard way of defining markup
languages of all kinds of documents.
- Developed in the early 1980s; ISO 8879 standard
in 1986

- HTML was developed using SGML in the early

1990s - specifically for Web documents

- Two problems with HTML:

1. Fixed set of tags and attributes

- User cannot define new tags or attributes

- So, the given tags must fit every kind of

document, and the tags cannot connote
any particular meaning

2. There are no restrictions on arrangement or

order of tag appearance in a document
8.1 Introduction (continued)
- Problem with using SGML:

- It’s too large and complex to use, and it is very

difficult to build a parser for it

- A better solution: Define a lite version of SGML

- XML is not a replacement for HTML

- HTML is a markup language used to describe the

layout of any kind of information

- XML is a meta-markup language that can be used

to define markup languages that can define the
meaning of specific kinds of information

- XML is a very simple and universal way of storing

and transferring data of any kind

- XML does not predefine any tags

-Unlike most word processing systems, XML has no

hidden specifications

- All documents described with an XML-derived

markup language can be parsed with a single
parser
- A parser is a program that analyses the syntax or
structure of a given file.
 Quick Comparison
HTML XML
- uses tags and - uses tags and
attributes attributes
- content and - content and format
formatting can be are separate;
placed together formatting is
<p><font=”Arial”>text</font> contained in a
- tags and stylesheet
attributes are pre- - allows user to
determined and specify what each
rigid tag and attribute
means

Chapter 8 © 2003 by Addison-Wesley, Inc. 5

8.1 Introduction (continued)
- We will refer to an XML-based markup language as a
tag set

- XHTML is HTML defined with XML

- The newest version of XML is 1.1 released in 2004.

- The browsers such as IE6, Netscape, and Firefox/

Mozilla support basic XML.

8.2 The Syntax of XML

- The syntax of XML is in two distinct levels:

1. The general low-level rules that apply to all

XML documents

2. For a particular XML tag set, either a document

type definition (DTD) or an XML schema
 The pieces

there are 3 components for

XML content:
- the XML document
- DTD (Document Type
Declaration)
- XSL (Extensible Stylesheet
Language)
The DTD and XSL do not need
to be present in all cases

Chapter 8 © 2003 by Addison-Wesley, Inc. 7

 A well-formed XML
document
elements have an open and close
tag, unless it is an empty element
attribute values are quoted
if a tag is an empty element, it has
a closing / before the end of the
tag
open and close tags are nested
correctly
there are no isolated mark-up
characters in the text (i.e. < > &
]]>)
if there is no DTD, all attributes are
of type CDATA by default

Chapter 8 © 2003 by Addison-Wesley, Inc. 8

 <root>
<child>
<subchild>.....</subchild>
</child>
</root>
 <bookstore>
• <book category="COOKING">
• <title lang="en">Everyday Italian</title>
• <author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>
• <year>2005</year>
• <price>30.00</price>
• </book>
• <book category="CHILDREN">
• <title lang="en">Harry Potter</title>
• <author>J K. Rowling</author>
• <year>2005</year>
• <price>29.99</price>
• </book>
 XML Naming Rules

• Names can contain letters, numbers, and

other characters

• Names cannot start with a number or

punctuation character

• Names cannot start with the letters xml

(or XML, or Xml, etc)

• Names cannot contain spaces

8.2 The Syntax of XML (continued)
- General XML Syntax

- XML documents have data elements, markup

declarations (instructions for the XML parser), and
processing instructions (for the application
program that is processing the data in the
document)

- All XML documents begin with an XML declaration:

<?xml version = "1.0"?>

- XML comments are just like HTML comments

- XML names:

- Must begin with a letter or an underscore

- They can include digits, hyphens, and periods
- There is no length limitation
- They are case sensitive (unlike HTML names)
8.2 The Syntax of XML (continued)
- Syntax rules for XML: (similar to those for XHTML)

- Every XML document defines a single root

element, whose opening tag must appear as
the first line of the document

- Every element that has content must have a

closing tag

- Tags must be properly nested

- All attribute values must be quoted

- An XML document that follows all of these rules is

well formed

<?xml version = "1.0">

<ad>
<year> 1960 </year>
<make> Cessna </make>
<model> Centurian </model>
<color> Yellow with white trim </color>
<location>
<city> Gulfport </city>
<state> Mississippi </state>
</location>
</ad>
8.2 The Syntax of XML (continued)
- Attributes are not used in XML the way they are in
HTML

- In XML, you often define a new nested tag to

provide more info about the content of a tag

- Nested tags are better than attributes, because

attributes cannot describe structure and the
structural complexity may grow

- Attributes should always be used to identify

numbers or names of elements (like HTML id and
name attributes)
8.2 The Syntax of XML (continued)
<!-- A tag with one attribute -->
<patient name = "Maggie Dee Magpie">
...
</patient>

<!-- A tag with one nested tag -->

<patient>
<name> Maggie Dee Magpie </name>
...
</patient>

<!-- A tag with one nested tag, which contains

three nested tags -->
<patient>
<name>
<first> Maggie </first>
<middle> Dee </middle>
<last> Magpie </last>
</name>
...
</patient>
8.3 XML Document Structure
- An XML document often uses two auxiliary files:

- One to specify the structural syntactic rules

- One to provide a style specification

- An XML document has a single root element, but

often consists of one or more entities

- Entities range from a single special character to

a book chapter

- An XML document has one document entity

- All other entities are referenced in the

document entity

- Reasons for entity structure:

1. Large documents are easier to manage

2. Repeated entities need not be literally repeated

3. Binary entities can only be referenced in the

document entities (XML is all text!)
8.3 XML Document Structure (continued)
- When the XML parser encounters a reference to
a non-binary entity, the entity is merged in

- Entity names:

- No length limitation
- Must begin with a letter, a dash, or a colon
- Can include letters, digits, periods, dashes,
underscores, or colons

- A reference to an entity has the form:

&entity_name;

- One common use of entities is for special

characters that may be used for markup delimiters

- These are predefined (as in XHTML):

< &lt;
> &gt;
& &amp;
" &quot;
' &apos;

- The user can only define entities in a DTD

8.3 XML Document Structure (continued)
- If several predefined entities must appear near
each other in a document, it is better to avoid
using entity references

- Character data section

<![CDATA[ content ]]>

e.g., instead of

Start &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; HERE

&lt; &lt; &lt; &lt;

use

<![CDATA[Start >>>> HERE <<<<]]>

- If the CDATA content has an entity reference,

it is taken literally
 7.4 Internal and External DTDs
A document type declaration can either
contain declarations directly or can refer to
another file
Internal
<!DOCTYPE root-element [
declarations
]>
External file
<!DOCTYPE root-name SYSTEM “file-name”>
A public identifier can also be specified,
that would be mapped to a system identifier
by the processing system

Chapter 8 © 2003 by Addison-Wesley, Inc. 20

8.4 Data Type Definitions
- A DTD is a set of structural rules called
declarations

- These rules specify a set of elements, along

with how and where they can appear in a
document

- Purpose: provide a standard form for a collection

of XML documents

- Not all XML documents have or need a DTD

- The DTD for a document can be internal or

external

- Errors in DTD: Find them early!

- All of the declarations of a DTD are enclosed in the

block of a DOCTYPE markup declaration

- DTD declarations have the form:

<!keyword … >

- There are four possible declaration keywords:

ELEMENT, ATTLIST, ENTITY, and NOTATION
 Unicode

Unicode is an industry standard for character encoding of text

documents. It defines (nearly) every possible international
character by a name and a number.

Unicode has two variants: UTF-8 and UTF-16.

UTF = Universal character set Transformation Format.

UTF-8 uses 1 byte (8-bits) to represent characters in the ASCII set,

and two or three bytes for the rest.

UTF-16 uses 2 bytes (16 bits) for most characters, and four bytes
for the rest.
 Data Type Definitions (continued)
- Declaring Elements

- Element declarations are similar to BNF

- An element declaration specifies the names of an

an element, and the element’s structure

- If the element is a leaf node of the document tree,

its structure is in terms of characters

- If it is an internal node, its structure is a list of

children elements (either leaf or internal nodes)

- General form:

<!ELEMENT element_name (list of child names)>

e.g.,

<!ELEMENT memo (from, to, date, re, body)>

memo

from to date re body

8.4 Data Type Definitions (continued)
- Declaring Elements (continued)

- Child elements can have modifiers, +, *, ?

e.g.,

<!ELEMENT person
(parent+, age, spouse?, sibling*)>

- Leaf nodes specify data types, most often

PCDATA, which is an acronym for parsable
character data

- Data type could also be EMPTY (no content)

and ANY (can have any content)

- Example of a leaf declaration:

<!ELEMENT name (#PCDATA)>

 Declaring Attributes

- General form:

<!ATTLIST el_name at_name at_type [default]>

#PCDATA(Parsable character data is a string of

Any printable characters except less-than(<)
And ampersand (&).

<!ELEMENT element_name (#PCDATA)

8.4 Data Type Definitions (continued)
- Declaring Attributes (continued)

- Attribute types: there are many possible, but we

will consider only CDATA

- Default values:

a value
#FIXED value (every element will have
this value),
#REQUIRED (every instance of the element must
have a value specified), or
#IMPLIED (no default value and need not specify
a value)

- e.g.,

<!ATTLIST car doors CDATA "4">

<!ATTLIST car engine_type CDATA #REQUIRED>
<!ATTLIST car price CDATA #IMPLIED>
<!ATTLIST car make CDATA #FIXED "Ford">

<car doors = "2" engine_type = "V8">

...
</car>
8.4 Data Type Definitions (continued)
- Declaring Entities

- Two kinds:

- A general entity can be referenced anywhere in

the content of an XML document

- A parameter entity can be referenced only in

a markup declaration

- General form of declaration:

<!ENTITY [%] entity_name "entity_value">

e.g., <!ENTITY jfk "John Fitzgerald Kennedy">

- A reference: &jfk;

- If the entity value is longer than a line, define it

in a separate file (an external text entity)

<!ENTITY entity_name SYSTEM "file_location">

→ SHOW planes.dtd
8.4 Data Type Definitions (continued)
- XML Parsers

- Always check for well formedness

- Some check for validity, relative to a given DTD

- Called validating XML parsers

- You can download a validating XML parser from:

http://xml.apache.org/xerces-j/index.html

- Internal DTDs

<!DOCTYPE root_name [
…
]>

- External DTDs

<!DOCTYPE XML_doc_root_name SYSTEM

“DTD_file_name”>
 NOTATION
Notations allow you to include that data in your documents
by describing the format it and allowing your application to
recognize and handle it.

<!NOTATION name system "external_ID">

<!NOTATION GIF system "image/gif">

8.5 Namespaces
- A markup vocabulary is the collection of all of the
element types and attribute names of a markup
language (a tag set)

- An XML document may define its own tag set and

also use that of another tag set - CONFLICTS!

- An XML namespace is a collection of names used

in XML documents as element types and attribute
names

- The name of an XML namespace has the form of

a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier)

- A namespace declaration has the form:

<element_name xmlns[:prefix] = URI>

- The prefix is a short name for the namespace,

which is attached to names from the
namespace in the XML document

<gmcars xmlns:gm = "http://www.gm.com/names">

- In the document, you can use <gm:pontiac>

- Purposes of the prefix:

1. Shorthand
2. URI includes characters that are illegal in XML
8.5 Namespaces (continued)

- Can declare two namespaces on one element

<gmcars xmlns:gm = "http://www.gm.com/names"

xmlns:html =
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtm11/strict">

- The gmcars element can now use gm names and

html names

- One namespace can be made the default by

leaving the prefix out of the declaration

8.6 XML Schemas

- Problems with DTDs:

1. Syntax is different from XML - cannot be parsed

with an XML parser

2. It is confusing to deal with two different syntactic

forms

3. DTDs do not allow specification of particular

kinds of data
8.6 XML Schemas (continued)
- XML Schemas is one of the alternatives to DTD

- Two purposes:

1. Specify the structure of its instance XML

documents

2. Specify the data type of every element and

attribute of its instance XML documents

- Schemas are written using a namespace:

http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema

- Every XML schema has a single root, schema

The schema element must specify the namespace

for schemas as its xmlns:xsd attribute

- Every XML schema itself defines a tag set, which

must be named

Namespace are element,schema,sequence and

string

targetNamespace ="http://cs.uccs.edu/planeSchema"
8.6 XML Schemas (continued)
- If we want to include nested elements, we must
set the elementFormDefault attribute to
qualified

- The default namespace must also be specified

xmlns = "http://cs.uccs.edu/planeSchema"

- A complete example of a schema element:

<xsd:schema

<!-- Namespace for the schema itself -->

<xmlns:xsd =
"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"

<!-- Namespace where elements defined here

will be placed -->

<targetNamespace =
"http://cs.uccs.edu/planeSchema"

<!-- Default namespace for this document -->

xmlns = "http://cs.uccs.edu/planeSchema"

<!-- Next, specify non-top-level elements to

be in the target namespace -->

elementFormDefault = "qualified">
8.6 XML Schemas (continued)
- Defining an instance document

- The root element must specify the namespaces

it uses

1. The default namespace

2. The standard namespace for instances

(XMLSchema-instance)

3. The location where the default namespace is

defined, using the schemaLocation attribute,
which is assigned two values

<planes
xmlns = "http://cs.uccs.edu/planeSchema"
xmlns:xsi =
http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation =
"http://cs.uccs.edu/planeSchema
planes.xsd" >

- Data Type Categories

1. Simple (strings only, no attributes and no

nested elements)

2. Complex (can have attributes and nested

elements)
 8.6 XML Schemas (continued)
- XMLS defines over 40 data types

- Primitive: string, Boolean, float, …

- Derived: byte, decimal, positiveInteger, NMTOKEN…

- User-defined (derived) data types – specify

constraints on an existing type (the base type)

- Constraints are given in terms of facets

(totalDigits, maxInclusive,MAXEXCKUSIVE etc.)

- Both simple and complex types can be either

named or anonymous

- DTDs define global elements (context is irrelevant)

- With XMLS, context is essential, and elements

can be either:

1. Local, which appears inside an element

that is a child of schema, or

2. Global, which appears as a child of schema

8.6 XML Schemas (continued)
- Defining a simple type:

- Use the element tag and set the name and type
attributes

<xsd:element name = "bird"

type = "xsd:string" />

- An instance could have:

<bird> Yellow-bellied sap sucker </bird>

- Element values can be constant, specified with

the fixed attribute

fixed = "three-toed"

- User-Defined Types

- Defined in a simpleType element, using facets

specified in the content of a restriction
element

- Facet values are specified with the value

attribute
8.6 XML Schemas (continued)
<xsd:simpleType name = "middleName" >
<xsd:restriction base = "xsd:string" >
<xsd:maxLength value = "20" />
</xsd:restriction>
</xsd:simpleType>

- Categories of Complex Types

1. Element-only elements
2. Text-only elements
3. Mixed-content elements
4. Empty elements

- Element-only elements

- Defined with the complexType element

- Use the sequence tag for nested elements that

must be in a particular order

- Use the all tag if the order is not important

8.6 XML Schemas (continued)
<xsd:complexType name = "sports_car" >
<xsd:sequence>
<xsd:element name = "make"
type = "xsd:string" />
<xsd:element name = "model "
type = "xsd:string" />
<xsd:element name = "engine"
type = "xsd:string" />
<xsd:element name = "year"
type = "xsd:string" />
</xsd:sequence>
</xsd:complexType>

- Nested elements can include attributes that give

the allowed number of occurrences
(minOccurs, maxOccurs, unbounded)

→ SHOW planes.xsd and planes.xml

- We can define nested elements elsewhere

<xsd:element name = "year" >

<xsd:simpleType>
<xsd:restriction base = "xsd:decimal" >
<xsd:minInclusive value = "1990" />
<xsd:maxInclusive value = "2003" />
</xsd:restriction>
</xsd:simpleType>
</xsd:element>
8.6 XML Schemas (continued)
- The global element can be referenced in the
complex type with the ref attribute

<xsd:element ref = "year" />

- Validating Instances of XML Schemas

- Can be done with several different tools

- One of them is xsv, which is available from:

http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/xsv-status.html

- Note: If the schema is incorrect (bad format), xsv

reports that it can find the schema

8.7 Displaying Raw XML Documents

- There is no presentation information in an XML
document

- An XML browser should have a default style sheet

for an XML document that does not specify one

- You get a stylized listing of the XML

→ SHOW Figure 8.2 and 8.3

8.8 Displaying XML Documents with
CSS
- A CSS style sheet for an XML document is just a
list of its tags and associated styles

- The connection of an XML document and its style

sheet is made through an xml-stylesheet
processing instruction

<?xml-stylesheet type = "text/css"

href = "mydoc.css"?>

--> SHOW planes.css and Figure 8.4

8.9 XSLT Style Sheets

- XSL began as a standard for presentations of XML
documents

- Split into three parts:

- XSLT - Transformations
- XSL-FO - Formatting objects
-XSL-P-Path Langauge

- XSLT uses style sheets to specify

transformations(functional-style programming lang)
XSLT DOC

XSLT
XML DOC XSL DOC
PROCESSOR
8.8 XSLT Style Sheets (continued)
- An XSLT processor merges an XML document into
an XSLT style sheet

- This merging is a template-driven process

- An XSLT style sheet can specify page layout,

page orientation, writing direction, margins, page
numbering, etc.

- The processing instruction we used for connecting

a CSS style sheet to an XML document is used to
connect an XSLT style sheet to an XML document

<?xml-stylesheet type = "text/xsl"

href = "XSLT style sheet"?>

- An example:

<?xml version = "1.0"?>

<!-- xslplane.xml -->
<?xml-stylesheet type = "text/xsl"
href = "xslplane.xsl" ?>
<plane>
<year> 1977 </year>
<make> Cessna </make>
<model> Skyhawk </model>
<color> Light blue and white </color>
</plane>
8.8 XSLT Style Sheets (continued)
- An XSLT style sheet is an XML document with a
single element, stylesheet, which defines
namespaces

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl =
"http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format">

- If a style sheet matches the root element of the

XML document, it is matched with the template:

<xsl:template match = "/">

- A template can match any element, just by naming

it (in place of /)

- XSLT elements include two different kinds of

elements, those with content and those for which
the content will be merged from the XML doc

- Elements with content often represent HTML

elements

<span style = "font-size: 14">

Happy Easter!
</span>
8.8 XML Transformations and Style
Sheets (continued)
- XSLT elements that represent HTML elements are
simply copied to the merged document

- The XSLT value-of element

- Has no content

- Uses a select attribute to specify part of the XML

data to be merged into the XSLT document

<xsl:value-of select = ”CAR/ENGINE" />

- The value of select can be any branch of the

document tree

--> SHOW xslplane.xsl and Figure 8.5

- The XSLT for-each element

- Used when an XML document has a sequence of

the same elements

--> SHOW xslplanes.xml

--> SHOW xslplanes.xsl & Figure 8.6