Office 2003 XML

Appendix A. The XML You Need for Office

A knowledge of XML is essential if you want to build applications around the Office XML capabilities rather than just using other people’s templates. If you’re already acquainted with XML, you don’t need to read this appendix. If you’re not, you should read on.

The general overview of XML given in this appendix should be sufficient to enable you to work with XML documents. For a much more solid grounding in the many details of XML, you should consider these books:

• Erik T. Ray, Learning XML (O’Reilly)

• Elliotte Rusty Harold and W. Scott Means, XML in a Nutshell (O’Reilly)

• Elizabeth Castro, XML for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide (Peachpit Press)

You may also be interested in the “Annotated XML Specification,” written by Tim Bray and published online at http://xml.com/, which an provides illuminating explanation of the XML 1.0 specification. You may also look to “What is XML?” by Norm Walsh, also published on XML.com.

What Is XML?

XML, the Extensible Markup Language, is an Internet-friendly format for data and documents invented by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The “Markup” denotes a way of expressing the structure of a document within the document itself. XML has its roots in a markup language called SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), which is used in publishing. HTML was an application of SGML to web publishing. XML was created to do for machine-readable documents on the Web what HTML did for human-readable ...