XML for Web Developers

Revision: TE3502_20060619

Course Length:

3 Days

Course Description:

This comprehensive course gives the student an introduction to the eXtensible Markup Language, or XML, and to several technologies that support management and presentation of XML documents on the Web.

Who Should Attend:

Those who desire a working knowledge of XML for the purpose of authoring Web documents, designing websites, and especially for managing and transforming XML documents as part of developing a web site.

Benefits of Attendance:

Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Use cascading stylesheets to present XML documents directly in a web browser.
• Use basic XPath and XSLT to transform XML documents into HTML for web presentation, with or without associated CSS.
• Express relationships between XML documents using simple XLinks.
• Understand the potential for extended XLinks in a document base or website.
• Write scripts into an XML document that use the DOM to manipulate the document in the browser, to enhance its presentation or filter content.
• Write scripts that handle browser-interpreted user events to modify the XML document and presentation in the browser.
• Use XSLT for XML-to-XML transformations.
• Use the built-in template rules correctly to process the right source information.
• Control exact production of text, HTML and XML elements, and whitespace.
• Use looping and conditional processing to manage output production.

Prerequisites:

Familiarity with JavaScript and HTML is preferred.

Course Outline:

• Chapter 1: Introduction
  1. History
  2. What is a Markup Language?
  3. SGML – Standard Generalized Markup Language
  4. HTML – Hypertext Markup Language
  5. Sample HTML Document
  6. XML – Extensible Markup Language
  7. XML Vocabularies
  8. Creating Semantic Tags
• Chapter 2: Getting Started With XML
  1. XML Syntax
  2. Elements
  3. Attributes
  4. Comments
  5. Unicode and Character Sets
  6. Character References
  7. Entity References
  8. Character Data Sections (CDATA)
  9. Processing Instructions
  10. Parsing XML
• Chapter 3: Document Type Definitions
  1. Introduction to DTDs
  2. Element Type Declarations
  3. Cardinality Summary
  4. Attribute Type Declarations
  5. String Attribute Type Declarations
  6. Attribute Default Specifications
  7. Enumerated Attribute Type Declarations
  8. ID Attribute Type Declarations
  9. IDREF and IDREFS Attribute Type Declarations
  10. NMTOKEN Attribute Type Declarations
  11. Entity Type Declarations
  12. Entity Declarations
  13. ENTITY Attribute Type Declarations
  14. NOTATION Attribute Type Declarations
• Chapter 4: Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 (CSS2)
  1. What is a CSS?
  2. Creating CSS2 Stylesheets
  3. Selecting Elements
  4. Pattern Matching
  5. STYLE Attributes
  6. Inheritance
  7. Cascades
  8. Multiple Stylesheets
  9. Comments
  10. Property Names and Values
• Chapter 5: XML Stylesheet Language (XSL)
  1. What is XSL?
  2. What is XSLT?
  3. Using XSLT
  4. XSL Syntax
  5. Namespaces
  6. Trees and Nodes
  7. Associating Documents with Stylesheets
  8. XSL Stylesheet Element
  9. XSL Template Elements
  10. Accessing Node Values
  11. XSL Apply-Templates Element
  12. XSLT Match Patterns
  13. Expressions as Tests in Patterns
  14. Matching by ID
  15. XSL If Element
  16. XSL Choose Element
  17. XSL For-Each Element
  18. XSL Sort Element
  19. XSL Comment Element
  20. Miscellaneous
• Chapter 6: XML Schema
  1. Introduction to XML Schema
  2. XML Schema Syntax
  3. Simple Types
  4. Built-In Primitive Simple Types
  5. Built-In Derived Simple Types
  6. Datatype Hierarchy
  7. Using Built-In Datatypes
  8. Defining Your Own Simple Types
  9. Facets
  10. List Types
  11. Union Types
  12. Complex Types
  13. Global vs. Local Elements and Attributes
  14. Complex Types with Simple Content
  15. Complex Types with Mixed Content
  16. Complex Types with No Content and Any Content
  17. Annotations
• Chapter 7: Scripting With the DOM
  1. The Document Object Model (DOM)
  2. Web Browsers and Parsers
  3. Parsing the XML Document
  4. Trees and Nodes
  5. DOM Node Types
• Chapter 8: Future XML Capabilities
  1. XLink
  2. XPointer