With our whirlwind tour of XML technologies and the Java APIs to manipulate them complete, we are ready to dive into more detail. We will spend the next two chapters detailing XML syntax and how XML can be used in web applications. This will give us the understanding of XML data that we need in order to create, format, parse, and manipulate it within our applications. In the next chapter, creating an XML document will be detailed, and further definition will be given of what it means for an XML document to be well-formed.
One last important note before we begin; if you skimmed the rest of the chapter, please take a moment and read this paragraph carefully. XML has been surrounded with confusion and misinformation since its inception. This book proceeds with the assumption that you are taking XML at face value, and not carrying any of those assumptions around with you, particularly ones about XML being designed for presentation. In other words, we are going to focus on XML as data. We will not refer to XML documents as data that is about to be presented, or information we can transform, but rather as simple data. This important concept may surprise you a bit, as most people still think of presentation when they think of XML. However, as Java developers, we need to treat XML as data and nothing more. We will spend the larger portion of this book not formatting XML, but merely parsing and manipulating it. The power of XML is transmitting data from system to system, application to application, and business to business. Trying to remove any preconceptions about what XML can do for you can help make this book more enjoyable, as well as show you a few ways to use XML you may not have considered.
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