Free xml programming tutorial Tutorials

SoftQuad’s XMetaL takes a good first cut at a workable interface for writers (as opposed to programmers or data-entry clerks) working with structured text. It’s more than an "XML editor", a label that might be applied to products like XED, XML Spy, and Vervet that provide basic data and metadata editing functions with explicit control over XML markup. XMetaL falls into new category that you might call XML or structured word processing along with Arbortext’s Adept Editor andWord Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: An update to this article has been posted here on 7/14/04.Summary Table of Editing Tools Why Ontologies? As the hype of past decades fades, the current heir to the artificial intelligence legacy may well be ontologies. Evolving from semantic network notions, modern ontologies are proving quite useful. And they are doing so without relying on the jumble of rule-based techniques common in earlier knowledge representation efforts. Thes Read the rest of this entry »

For a long time now, RDF has shown great promise as a flexible format for storing, aggregating, and using metadata. Maybe for too long—its most well-known syntax, RDF/XML, is messy enough to have scared many people away from RDF. The W3C is developing a new, simpler syntax called RDFa (originally called “RDF/a”) that is easy enough to create and to use in applications that it may win back a lot of the people who were first scared off by the verbosity, striping, container complications, and Read the rest of this entry »

In the preceding three columns I discussed the W3C TechnicalArchitecture Group’s Architecture of the WorldWide Web (AWWW). In last week’s column I examined in somedetail the AWWW’s discussion of the first of three key architecturalprinciples, namely, resource identification. In this column I willconclude that discussion by considering the issues of URI ambiguity,opacity, and fragment identifiers.URI AmbiguityI remain puzzled by some of the AWWW’s claims about URIs. Section 2.3,URIAmbiguity, cont Read the rest of this entry »

“If I have an XML schema, is there any way that I can work with that schema to build forms for populating instances of that schema?”Over the years, I’ve seen a number of variations on this same question, and generally for a pretty good reason. It takes a lot of work to create a schema in the first place, but when you’re done, what you end up with, in general, is something that seems like it should be good to generate something; you have data type information, constraint information, enumerations Read the rest of this entry »

Although the XSL specification is still in development,some implementations for XSL Formatting Objects are emerging. Two new projectsdemonstrated at XTech 2000 use XSL to present XML content with sophisticatedformatting.Yomu describes XSL and XML for Electronic Book PublishingThe XML family of standards provides the foundation for Yomu’s Æsopelectronic book browser technology. Integrating XML, XSL, XSLT, XLink, andCascading Style Sheets, Æsop implements the Open eBook (OEB) Specifi Read the rest of this entry »

Micah Dubinko’s new column, XML Annoyances, begins this week with a look at the role of microformats, particularly with regard to Web 2.0 applications and services, as the core XML-specification era comes to a close.–EditorWe are all creatures of habit. We get set in our ways and comfortable with our working set of assumptions about the world around us. Yet sometimes those assumptions are misplaced, a sure-fire cause of annoyance. This goes for the XML community as much as any other group. For Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a regular reader of this column, or if you just read thespecification carefully, you would know that SVG is more than just avector graphics XML vocabulary. While I won’t bore you here with thelist of application contexts SVG is suited for, I will point out thatsince Day One there have been synergies between the work that tookplace at W3C around multimedia (SMIL) and SVG. For example,as we saw in the first article of this column, SVG supports SMIL Animation, usingelements like <anima Read the rest of this entry »

It’s easy to learn and use W3C XML Schema once you know how toavoid the pitfalls. You should at least learn the followingthings. Do use element declarations, attribute groups, model groups, and simple types. Do use XML namespaces as much as possible. Learn the correct way to use them. Do not try to be a master of XML Schema. It would take months. Do not use complex types (why?), attribute declarations (why?), or notations (why?). Do not use local declarations (why?). Do not us Read the rest of this entry »

Google’s release of an API has been heralded as a bright moment forweb services. It is an exciting development, but at the same timethere is a subset of the programmer community that isdisappointed. Google had a similar XML-based API a year ago, butneither documented nor publicized it. Merely by changing “/search” to”/xml” in any Google query, you could get back an XML representationof the query result. It became a pay-only service last fall, which,while unfortunate, was understandable as the se Read the rest of this entry »