XML Pocket Reference, 3rd Edition

Introduction

After several years of incredible hype, XML, the Extensible Markup Language, has settled down to become a respectable part of developers’ toolboxes. XML’s structured, text-based format has made it easy for programming languages and environments to support it, making XML the lingua franca of the data exchange world. XML wasn’t the first way to do this, but it was the first that successfully attained approachable simplicity while representing complex data structures.

XML provides its users with tremendous flexibility. It defines a set of hierarchical structures for containing content, but leaves the details of those structures, including their names, to the people who create XML vocabularies. XML’s common structures make it possible to create parsers and other toolkits that work on any legal XML out there, while still allowing customization of the data stored in those documents. Developers can do generic processing on XML documents as well as create applications that understand particular types of XML documents.

This reference covers the core of the XML standards for representing data, including the core structures of XML 1.0 and 1.1, namespaces, and schema languages for describing XML vocabularies. It doesn’t cover tools for processing XML.

In this latest edition of the book, Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) has been moved to a new, well-earned location in a separate O’Reilly book—the XSLT 1.0 Pocket Reference—to make room here for schema information. ...