Resources for XML Programmers

Standards Bodies

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Sets technical standards related to the Internet (TCP/IP, DNS, etc.) Documented in "Requests for Comments" (RFCs).
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Technical standards related to the Web (HTML, XML, Style Sheets, etc.) Documented in "Recommendations".

XML and XSL

• The Extensible Markup Language (XML) and its presentation component (style sheets for web pages -- XSL)
• The XML home page
• The official XML 1.0 specification
• Tim Bray's annotated XML specification
• Robin Cover's XML overview at OASIS
• An overview of XML stylesheets (XSL)
• The official XSL specification
• The official XSLT specification
• The official XPath specification
• O'Reilly Press' XML Pocket Reference, by Robert Eckstein, 1999, approx $8.
• Sun's excellent XML web site has white papers, specifications, tutorials, and more.
• An excellent FAQ about XML.
• A collection of namespaces dos and don'ts: Use XML namespaces with care
• A FAQ about namespaces.
• Microsoft's explanation of namespaces: Understanding XML Namespaces
• XML Namespaces by Example by Tim Bray, one of XML's inventors
• XML.org, the self-proclaimed XML industry portal.
• A good XML FAQ
• Saxon is the preferred command-line tool for processing stylesheets. Get it from sourceforge.net.
• Lots of tools and links for XML and XSL, including a (now-obsolete, alas) hierarchical XML viewer
• An XSL tutorial
• XML.com, a commercial site
• Perl offers lots of tools for processing XML and XSL.
• Perl-XML FAQ
• Perl modules for XML
• The Perl-XML mailing list. To join, send a message with SUBSCRIBE Perl-XML in the body.
• Cafe con Leche XML News and Resources -- a FAQ, a good list of hyperlinks to W3C documents, tools, sites, etc.
• Michael Floyd's nascent website, Beyond HTML, includes a useful database of XML tools. He also writes a monthly column on XML in Webtechniques Magazine on topics including Presenting Data with the XML DSO, Serving XML with Active Server Pages, and more.
• The voiceXML Forum promotes an interesting application: making Internet content and information accessible via voice and phone.
• The W3C is working on several projects related to user interface technologies.

Tools

• The Oxygen XML editor has lots of good features and a well-designed user interface.
• XML Cooktop is a free Windows-based editor and development environment for XML, DTD, and XSLT documents.
• Tools are becoming available to ease the transition from HTML to XML. For example, here's an article in WebTechniques magazine describing HTML Tidy, a GUI-based tool for converting HTML to XHTML (well-formed HTML) as a first step toward XML. It also mentions XSpLit, a tool for splitting HTML documents into XML (content) and XSL (format) files.
• Macromedia's Dreamweaver and Director products use XML.
• SoftQuad's XMetaL generates XML.
• XML Spy offers a somewhat user-friendly XML editor. A soon-to-be-released improved version will be entirely graphical.

Microsoft

• XML site.
• XML tutorial.
• Schemas supersede DTDs. They're better. Here's the schema lesson.
• XML Notepad, an XML editor from Microsoft, and its documentation
• MSDN Online Voices - The Duwamish Books Sample Application

Applications and Vendors

Chapter 1 Resources

• W3C Extensible Markup Language (XML) Site.

• W3C: Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Second Edition) Recommendation (6 Oct 2000).

• Microsoft's XML Site

• Microsoft's XML Tutorial

• XSL:P Processor Documentation

• W3C: Namespaces in XML Recommendation (14 Jan 1999).

Chapter 2 Resources

• W3C: Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Second Edition) Recommendation (6 Oct 2000).

• HAROLD, Elliotte Rusty. XML: Extensible Markup Language. IDG Books Worldwide, 1998.

• FLOYD, Michael. Building Web Sites with XML. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR, 1999.

• The Scholarly Technology Group at Brown University offers an online XML validating parser.

• XSL:P Processor Documentation

• XP Parser Documentation

• Here's DTDgen, a handy tool that reads a well-formed XML file and generates a DTD. (Note that the XML file must be well-formed and must contain no references to other local files such as DTDs or external entities.)

Chapter 3 Resources

• Microsoft XML Schema Developer's Guide.

• Microsoft XML Schema Reference. It defines the elements used in MS schemas:

  
           <attribute>
           <AttributeType>
           <datatype>
           <description>
           <element>
           <ElementType>
           <group>
           <schema>
         

• Microsoft XML Data Types Reference.

• W3C Documents on which Microsoft's implementation is based:
  • W3C XML-Data Note (5 Jan 1988)

  • W3C Document Content Description for XML Note (31 Jul 1988)

• Most recent W3C Schema standards:
  • W3C XML Schema Part 0: Primer Candidate Recommendation (24 Oct 2000)

  • W3C XML Schema Part 1: Structures Candidate Recommendation (24 Oct 2000)

  • W3C XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes Candidate Recommendation (24 Oct 2000)

• FLOYD, Michael. Building Web Sites with XML. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR, 1999.

Chapter 4 Resources

• W3C Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) 1.0 Working Draft (18 Oct 00).

• W3C XSL Transformations (XSLT) 1.0 Recommendation (16 Nov 99).

• Microsoft's XSLT Developer's Guide

• Microsoft's Getting Started with XSLT

• Microsoft's XSLT Reference

• SPENCER, Paul. Professional XML Design and Implementation. Wrox Press Ltd., Birmingham, UK, 1999.

• Whitespace handling is a subtle issue. You ran into it in this chapter. The XML spec explicitly addresses this issue.

• A useful quick reference guide for XSLT and XPath is provided by Mulberry Technologies Inc.

Chapter 5 Resources

• W3C XML Linking Language (XLink) 1.0 Candidate Recommendation (3 Jul 2000).

• W3C XML Pointer Language (XPointer) 1.0 Candidate Recommendation (7 Jun 2000).

• W3C XML Path Language (XPath) 1.0 Recommendation (16 Nov 19999).

• HAROLD, Elliotte Rusty. XML: Extensible Markup Language. IDG Books Worldwide, 1998.