The XML Companion

• Authors: Neil Bradley
• Venue: The XML Companion
• Year: 1998

From the Book:Preface The Extensible Markup Language is a powerful publishing and document interchange format. Developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, it was released, to widespread acclaim, in 1998. XML has a superficial resemblance to HTML, the established language of the Web, but information held in this format is self-describing - it can be extracted, manipulated and formatted to the requirements of any target audience or publishing medium. XML should be of interest to HTML designers who need more flexibility to manage and customize their documents, to SGML users seeking advanced yet modestly priced applications, and to software developers requiring a flexible storage or interchange format that has powerful supporting tools. The XML Companion serves the programmer, analyst or consultant involved in the management, processing, transfer or publication of XML documents. Detailed study of XML is supported by the inclusion of cross-referenced 'road maps' of the building blocks that comprise the standard, and an extensive glossary. Related standards for cataloguing, linking and styling XML files are also covered in detail. This edition The first edition of this book was completed within weeks of the release of the XML standard. Since that time, no significant pressure to modify or enhance the core standard has emerged. Justification for a new edition of this book therefore rests upon the high degree of activity surrounding XML. Complementary standards for processing, presenting and merging XML data have since been released, and this edition provides detailed coverage of DOM 1.0, SAX 1.0, CSS 2 andNamespaces 1.0. Other standards have progressed, but are still being refined, so this edition simply describes later, more stable drafts of XSL (now divided into XSL and XSLT) and XLL (now divided into XLink and XPointer). Other proposed standards have only very recently emerged. The next version of HTML (XHTML) will be an application of XML (instead of SGML), and the XML Catalog proposal defines a standard scheme for managing the mapping of entity identifiers to local system files. A new scheme for navigating around XML documents, called XPath, will be utilised by the linking and styling standards. This opportunity has been taken to rectify a number of minor syntactic and grammatical mistakes, as well as a few factual errors, and thanks are due to readers of the first edition for highlighting many of these issues. Very little material from the first edition has been omitted, so the new book is a little larger than before. Despite this, it is hoped that the book can still serve as a 'companion' for those who are constantly on the move. Acknowledgements A repeated thanks to all those mentioned in the first edition of this book, as their contributions remain relevant. In addition, a number of readers of the first edition have contributed suggestions and observations that have helped improve the quality of this work, and their efforts are appreciated. Finally, thanks once again to Adobe for FrameMaker+SGML (which was used both in the preparation and publication of this book). Feedback Comments and suggestions for a possible future edition are welcome. They should be sent to the author, who can be found at [e-mail]. Updates, additions and corrections can be obtained from the author's Web page, located at 'http://www.bradley.co.uk', which also contains links to various XML and SGML related sites. Neil Bradley August1999