Abstract
The primary purpose of the chapter is to introduce the basics for reading and writing text with XML markup. The logical structure of an XML document includes primarily nested elements, some of which have associated attributes. A document type definition (DTD) can be included to constrain the contents and structure of the document. The concepts of well-formedness and validity of documents are defined. Two alternative constraining mechanisms, XML Schema and RELAX NG, are introduced and compared to DTDs. Finally, the two standard processing models for XML, one based on streams and one based on trees, are introduced. Although not all details of XML are covered, the chapter provides some literacy with respect to XML specifications, so that the complete language can be learned as necessary.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
“Once a fatal error is detected, however, the processor MUST NOT continue normal processing (i.e., it MUST NOT continue to pass character data and information about the document’s logical structure to the application in the normal way).” “This innocent-looking definition embodies one of the most important and unprecedented aspects of XML: ‘Draconian’ error-handling.” [3]
- 3.
By default, curly apostrophes and quotation marks are commonly used in place of straight ones in documents prepared by word processors. However, these marks are not accepted by XML processors and are a common cause of parsing errors when examples are copied for XML parsing.
- 4.
Character references are syntactically similar to general entity references and can appear in the same contexts. However, character references are not parsed as described in this section. See instead Sect. 2.3.3.
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Salminen, A., Tompa, F. (2011). Fundamentals. In: Communicating with XML. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0992-2_2
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