XML Course Tools
- Text editor
- XML data files, stylesheets, DTDs, and schemas
are ll simply text files.
- Create and edit them with a text editor.
- Any editor is acceptable.
- The ability to display line numbers is helpful
when error messages give them.
- XML code viewer
- Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser is the
preferred tool for viewing XML code.
- It detects syntax errors (especially
ill-formedness) and gives meaningful error
messages including line numbers.
- Any version from 5.0 forward suffices.
- When you open an XML file without an associated
XSL style sheet, IE parses it and displays it in a "normalized"
form, showing element names, special characters, comments and text
in different colors, and indenting elements in a hierarchical
manner.
- Validating parsers
- Numerous tools are available for validating XML
data against DTDs and schemas.
- In this class we use xmlint
(from Microsoft)
and saxon
(from Sourceforge).
Download them here.
- These are invoked on the command line in a DOS
window.
- Another approach is to use
XMLDOM, an ActiveX object that can be invoked from a web page --
- Run it
- Checks the validity of XML documents
- A freeware Microsoft sample application
- Works with Internet Explorer 5.0 (not with Netscape)
- Uses Microsoft extensions to Javascript (XML-processing functions)
- Stylesheet processors
- IE 6.0 does a good job of applying stylesheets
to XML data files.
