Wrox - Professional XML

Introduction

eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has emerged as nothing less than a phenomenon in computing. It is a concept elegant in its simplicity driving dramatic changes in the way Internet applications are written. This book is a revision to the first edition to keep pace with this fast-changing technology as many technologies have been superseded, and new ones have emerged.

What Does This Book Cover?

This book explains and demonstrates both the essential techniques for designing and using XML documents, and many of the related technologies that are important today. Almost everything in this book will be based around a specification provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These specifications are at various levels of completion and some of the technologies are nascent, but we expect them to become very popular when their specifications are finalized because they are useful or essential. The wider XML community is increasingly jumping in and offering new XMLrelated ideas outside the control of the W3C, although the W3C is still central and important to the development of XML.
The focus of this book is on learning how to use XML as an enabling technology in real-world applications. It presents good design techniques, and shows how to interface XML-enabled applications with web applications. Whether your requirements are oriented toward data exchange or presentation, this book will cover all the relevant techniques in the XML community.

Most chapters contain a practical example (unless the technology is so new that there were no working implementations at the time of writing). As XML is a platform-neutral technology, the examples cover a variety of languages, parsers, and servers. All the techniques are relevant across all the platforms, so you can get valuable insight from the examples even if they are not implemented using your favorite platform.