XML

Extensible Markup Language

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Document exchange
Word Processor Spreadsheet

XML

Web Browser

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Components of a document
• Content: the components (words, images, etc). Which make up a
document.

• Structure: the organization and inter-relationship of the

components

• Presentation: how a document looks and what processes are

applied to it.

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Separating these things means…
• Content can be re-used

• Structure can be formally validated

• Presentation can be customized for

 Different media
 Different audiences

• The information can be uncoupled from its processing

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What is metadata?
• Data about data

• Data associated with objects which relieves their potential users of

having to have full advance knowledge of their existence or
characteristics.

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What is XML?
• XML stands for EXtensible Markup Language
• It is called extensible because it is no a fixed format like HTML
• XML is set of rules for designing text formats that let you structure
data
• XML tags are not predefined. You must define your own tags

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What does XML Look Like?
• It is only a text file and it doesn’t require you to have a particular
operating system or hardware.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Document>
<Greeting>
Welcome to XML
</Greeting>
<Message>
This is an XML document. Bet you're surprised.
</Message>
</document>

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Why XML?
• XML makes the structure of the document explicit to computer
programs.

• An HTML page encodes information in a form easily processed by

humans.

• HTML lacks a structure that facilitates information processing.

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Example: It is hard to do the following
with HTML
• News in HTML:
 What’s the headline of the story?
 Who is the author?

• Product info in HTML:

 What is the price of the item?
 What category of item is it?

• If you want to publish information in a form that software clients can

process it
 You need to produce pages in which the structure is explicit for software to
exploit.

• That’s what XML does.

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The different between HTML and XML?
• HTML was designed to display data and to focus on how data
looks

• XML was designed to structure data and to focus on what data is

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XML looks like a bit like HTML
• Like HTML , XML makes use of tags (words bracketed by ‘<’ .. ‘>’).

• HTML is a specific markup language that contains a fixed set of

elements and attributes.
 The tags used to HTML documents and the structure of HTML documents
are predefined (I.e. <p>, <h1>,…)

• XML uses the tags only to delimit pieces of data , and leaves the
interpretation of the data completely to the application that reads it.

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XML vs. HTML: Information Storage
• HTML
 Information is stored in HTML in its final form

• XML:
 Information stored in XML can be presented in a variety of ways for
different audiences and scenarios , since the data and display are separate.

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XML Rules
• Tags are enclosed in angle brackets.
• Tags come in pairs with start-tags and end-tags.
• Tags must be properly nested.
 <name><email>…</name></email> is not allowed.
 <name><email>…</email><name> is.

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More XML Rules
• Tags are case sensitive.
 <address> is not the same as <Address>
• XML in any combination of cases is not allowed as part of a tag.
• Tags may not contain ‘<‘ or ‘&’.
• Documents must have a single root tag that begins the document.

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XML Files are Trees
address

name email phone birthday

first last year month day

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XML Trees
• An XML document has a single root node.
• The tree is a general ordered tree.
 A parent node may have any number of children.
 Child nodes are ordered, and may have siblings.

• Preorder traversals are usually used for getting information out of

the tree.

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Steps of creating an XML file
• Discover (or establish) the structure of your data.
 Use DTD or XML schema

• Build the XML file that holds the data.

• Apply a formatting style to the xml file.

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Document Type Definitions

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Document type definitions
• DTDs (Document Type Definitions) contain a list of element , tags,
attributes and entity references contained in an XML document and
describes their relationships to each other.

• Simply, DTD
 Specifies a list of tags
 Defines the relationships between these tags .

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Document Type Definitions
• A DTD describes the tree structure of a document and something
about its data.
• There are two data types, PCDATA and CDATA.
 PCDATA is parsed character data.
 CDATA is character data, used about text data not be parsed.

• A DTD determines how many times a node may appear, and how
child nodes are ordered.

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DTD for address Example
<!ELEMENT address (name, email, phone, birthday)>
<!ELEMENT name (first, last)>
<!ELEMENT first (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT last (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT email (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT phone (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT birthday (year, month, day)>
<!ELEMENT year (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT month (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT day (#PCDATA)>

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Structure of a DTD
• A DTD always starts with <! DOCTYPE and always ends with ]>

• Directly after the <! DOCTYPE comes the name of the document
element followed by a [

• Then comes a list of all elements and attributes contained in the

XML file, including the document element

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Example of DTD
<!DOCTYPE note
[
<!ELEMENT note (to,from,heading,body)>
<!ELEMENT to (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT from (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT heading (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT body (#PCDATA)>
]>

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XML: Example of DTD
<!DOCTYPE employees [
<!ELEMENT employees (name,email,tel,fax)>
<!ELEMENT name (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT email (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT tel (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT fax (#PCDATA)>
]>

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Example: XML Structure
<employees>
<name>Karim</name>
<email>karim@yahoo.com</email>
<tel>00202352</tel>
<fax>00202536</fax>
</ employees>

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Where do I get a DTD?
• Industry announcements
• Some recent examples
 Chemical Markup Language(chemical modelling)
 Math Markup Language
 Etc.

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Assignment
• What is XML Schema Definition (XSD)
• Compare it with DTD

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