INTRODUCTION TO XML

INTRODUCTION TO XML

SGML(Standard Generalized Markup Language) is a meta-markup language

- HTML was developed using SGML in the early 990s - specifically for Web documents
- Two problems with HTML:
- 1. Fixed set of tags and attributes
- User cannot define new tags or attributes
- So, the given tags must fit every kind of document, and the tags cannot suggest any particular
meaning
2. There are few restrictions on arrangement or order of tag appearance in a document
- One solution to the first of these problems: Let each group of users define its own tags
(with implied meanings)
Problem with using SGML:
- It’s too large and complex to use, and it is very
difficult to build a parser for it
- A better solution: Define a lite version of SGML
- - XML is not a replacement for HTML
- HTML is a markup language used to describe the layout of any kind of information
- XML is a meta-markup language that can be used to define markup languages that can define the
meaning of specific kinds of information
- XML is a very simple and universal way of storing and transferring data of any kind
- XML does not predefine any tags
- XML has no hidden specifications
- All documents described with an XML-derived markup language can be parsed with a single parser
• We will refer to an XML-based markup language as a tag set
- Strictly speaking, a tag set is an XML application,but that terminology can be confusing
- An XML processor is a program that parses XML documents and provides the parts to an application
- A document that uses an XML-based markup language is an XML document
SYNTAX OF XML
• XML imposes two distinct levels of syntax:
• There is a general low level syntax that is appreciable on all XML documents
• The other syntactic level is specified by DTD (Document Type Definition) or XML schemas.
• The DTDs and XML schemas specify a set of tag and attribute that can appear in a particular
document or collection of documents.
• They also specify the order of occurrence in the document.
• The XML documents consists of data elements which form the statements of XML document.
• The XML document might also consists of markup declaration, which act as instructions to the
XML parser
• All XML documents begin with an XML declaration. This declaration identifies that the document
is a XML document and also specifies version number of XML standard.
• It also specifies encoding standard.

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<?xml version = “1.0” encoding = “utf-8”?>

• Comments in XML is similar to HTML
• XML names are used to name elements and attributes.
• XML names are case-sensitive.
• There is no limitation on the length of the names.
• All XML document contains a single root element whose opening tag appears on first line of the
code
• All other tags must be nested inside the root element
• As in case of XHTML, XML tags can also have attributes
• The values for the attributes must be in single or double quotation
Example:
1. <?xml version = “1.0” encoding = “utf-8”?>
<student>
<name>Santhosh</name>
<usn>BCA15001</usn>
</student>
2. Tags with attributes
The above code can be also written as
<student name = “Santhosh B S” usn = “1RN10CS090”> </student>

XML DOCUMENT STRUCTURE

• An XML document often consists of 2 files:
• One of the document – that specifies its tag set
• The other specifies the structural syntactic role and one that contains a style sheet to describe
how content of the document is to be printed
• The structural roles are given as either a DTD or an XML schema
• An XML document consists of logically related collection of information known as entities
• The document entity is the physical file that represent the document itself
• The document is normally divided into multiple entities.
• One of the advantage dividing document into multiple entities is managing the document
becomes simple
• If the same data appears in more than one place, defining it as an entity allows number of
references to a single copy of the data
• Many documents include information that cannot be represented as text. Ex: images
• Such information units are stored as binary data
• These binary data must be a separate unit to be able to include in XML document
• These entities are called as Binary entities
• When an XML processor encounters the name of a non-binary entity in a document, it replaces
the name with value it references
• Binary entities can be handled only by browsers

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• XML processor or parsers can only deal with text

• Entity names can be of any length. They must begin with a letter, dash or a colon
• A reference to an entity is its name with a prepended ampersand and an appended semicolon
• Example: if stud_name is the name of entity, &stud_name; is a reference to it
• One of the use of entities is to allow characters used as markup delimiters to appears as
themselves
• The entity references are normally placed in CDATA section
• Syntax: <! [CDATA[ content ] ] >
• For example, instead of
The last word of the line is &gt;&gt;&gt; here &lt;&lt;&lt;. the following could be used:
<![CDATA[The last word of the line is >>> here <<<]]>

DOCUMENT TYPE DEFINITIONS

• A DTD is a set of structural rules called declarations which specify a set of elements that can
appear in the document. It also specifies how and where these elements appear
• DTD also specify entity definitions
• DTD is more useful when the same tag set definition is used by collection of documents
• A DTD can be embedded in XML document whose syntax rules it describes
• In this case, a DTD is called as internal DTD or a separate file can be created which can be linked
to XML file. In this case the DTD is called as External DTD
• An external DTD can be used with more than one XML file
• Syntactically, a DTD is a sequence of declarations. Each declaration has the form of markup
declaration
• Example: <!keyword...>
• Four possible keywords can be used in a declaration:
• ELEMENT, used to define tags;
• ATTLIST, used to define tag attributes;
• ENTITY, used to define entities; and
• NOTATION, used to define data type notations.

DECLARING ELEMENTS
• DTD follows rules of context-free grammar for element declaration
• A DTD describes the syntactic structure of a particular set of documents
• Each element declaration in a DTD specifies the structure of one category of elements
• An element is a node in such a tree either a leaf node or an internal node
• If element is leaf node, its syntactic description is its character pattern
• If the element is internal node, its syntactic description is a list of its child element
• The form of an element declaration for elements that contain elements is as follows:

<!ELEMENT element_name (list of names of child elements)>

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• For example, consider the following declaration:

• <!ELEMENT memo (from, to, date, re, body)>
• This element declaration would describe the document tree structure shown in Figure 7.1.

• In many cases, it is necessary to specify the number of times that a child element may appear.
This can be done in a DTD declaration by adding a modifier to the child element specification.
These modifiers, described in Table 7.1, are borrowed from regular expressions.
• Any child element specification can be followed by one of the modifiers.

MODIFIER MEANING

• Consider the following DTD declaration:

<!ELEMENT person (parent+, age, spouse?, sibling*)>

• In this example, a person element is specified to have the following child elements: one or more
parent elements, one age element, possibly a spouse element, and zero or more sibling
elements.
• The leaf nodes of a DTD specify the data types of the content of their parent nodes, which are
elements.
• In most cases, the content of an element is type PCDATA, for parsable character data. Parsable
character data is a string of any printable characters except “less than” (<), “greater than” (>),
and the ampersand (&).
• Two other content types can be specified: EMPTY and ANY.
• The EMPTY type specifies that the element has no content; it is used for elements similar to the
XHTML img element.
• The ANY type is used when the element may contain literally any content.

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• The form of a leaf element declaration is as follows:

<!ELEMENT element_name (#PCDATA)>

DECLARING ATTRIBUTES
 The attributes of an element are declared separately from the element declaration in a DTD. An
attribute declaration must include the name of the element to which the attribute belongs, the
attribute’s name, its type, and a default option. The general form of an attribute declaration is
as follows:

<!ATTLIST element_name attribute_name attribute type default_option>

 If more than one attribute is declared for a given element, the declarations can be combined, as
in the following element

• The default option in an attribute declaration can specify either an actual value or a requirement
for the value of the attribute in the XML document.

For example, suppose the DTD included the following attribute specifications:
Then the following XML element would be valid for this DTD:

<airplane places = “10” engine_type = “jet”> </airplane>

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DECLARING ENTITIES :
 Entities can be defined so that they can be referenced anywhere in the content of an XML
document, in which case they are called general entities. The predefined entities are all general
entities.
 Entities can also be defined so that they can be referenced only in DTDs, in which case they are
called parameter entities.
 The form of an entity declaration is

<!ENTITY [%] entity_name “entity_value”>

 When the optional percent sign (%) is present in an entity declaration, it specifies that the entity
is a parameter entity rather than a general entity.
 Example: <!ENTITY sbs “Santhosh B Suresh”>
 When an entity is longer than a few words, its text is defined outside the DTD. In such cases, the
entity is called an external text entity. The form of the declaration of an external text entity is

<!ENTITY entity_name SYSTEM “file_location”>

A Sample DTD :

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• Some XML parsers check documents that have DTDs in order to ensure that the documents
conform to the structure specified in the DTDs. These parsers are called validating parsers.
• If an XML document specifies a DTD and is parsed by a validating XML parser, and the parser
determines that the document conforms to the DTD, the document is called valid.
• Handwritten XML documents often are not well formed, which means that they do not follow
XML’s syntactic rules.
• Any errors they contain are detected by all XML parsers, which must report them.
• XML parsers are not allowed to either repair or ignore errors.
• Validating XML parsers detect and report all inconsistencies in documents relative to their DTDs.

INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL DTDs

Internal DTD Example:

External DTD Example: [assuming that the DTD is stored in the file named planes.dtd]

<!DOCTYPE planes_for_sale SYSTEM “planes.dtd”>

EXAMPLE: sampleDTD.xml

NAMESPACES :
• One problem with using different markup vocabularies in the same document is that collisions
between names that are defined in two or more of those tag sets could result.
• An example of this situation is having a <table> tag for a category of furniture and a <table> tag
from XHTML for information tables.
• Clearly, software systems that process XML documents must be capable of unambiguously
recognizing the element names in those documents.
• To deal with this problem, the W3C has developed a standard for XML namespaces (at
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names).
• An XML namespace is a collection of element and attribute names used in XML documents. The
name of a namespace usually has the form of a uniform resource identifier (URI).
• A namespace for the elements and attributes of the hierarchy rooted at a particular element is
declared as the value of the attribute xmlns.
• The form of a namespace declaration for an element is

<element_name xmlns[:prefix] = URI>

• The square brackets indicate that what is within them is optional. The prefix, if included, is the
name that must be attached to the names in the declared namespace.

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• If the prefix is not included, the namespace is the default for the document.
• A prefix is used for two reasons. First, most URIs are too long to be typed on every occurrence of
every name from the namespace. Second, a URI includes characters that are invalid in XML.
• Note that the element for which a namespace is declared is usually the root of a document.
• For ex: all XHTML documents in this notes declare the xmlns namespace on the root element,
html:

<html xmlns = “http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>

• This declaration defines the default namespace for XHTML documents, which is
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml.
• The next example declares two namespaces. The first is declared to be the default namespace;
the second defines the prefix, cap:

XML SCHEMAS
XML schemas is similar to DTD i.e. schemas are used to define the structure of the document DTDs had
several disadvantages:
• The syntax of the DTD was un-related to XML, therefore they cannot be analysed with an XML
processor
• It was very difficult for the programmers to deal with 2 different types of syntaxes
• DTDs does not support the data type of content of the tag. All of them are specified as text
• Hence, schemas were introduced

SCHEMA FUNDAMENTALS :
• Schemas can be considered as a class in object oriented programming
• A XML document that conforms to the standard or to the structure of the schema is similar to
an object
• The XML schemas have 2 primary purposes.
• They are used to specify the structure of its instance of XML document, including which
elements and attributes may appear in instance document. It also specifies where and
how often the elements may appear
• The schema specifies the datatype of every element and attributes of XML
• The XML schemas are namespace-centric

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DEFINING A SCHEMA
Schemas themselves are written with the use of a collection of tags, or a vocabulary, from a
namespace that is, in effect, a schema of schemas. The name of this namespace is:

http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema
• Every schema has schema as its root element. This namespace specification appears as follows:

xmlns:xsd = “http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema”
• The name of the namespace defined by a schema must be specified with the targetNamespace
attribute of the schema element.

targetNamespace = “http://cs.uccs.edu/planeSchema”
• If the elements and attributes that are not defined directly in the schema element are to be
included in the target namespace, schema’s elementFormDefault must be set to qualified, as
follows:

elementFormDefault = “qualified”
• The default namespace, which is the source of the unprefixed names in the schema, is given
with another xmlns specification, but this time without the prefix:

xmlns = “http://cs.uccs.edu/planeSchema”

Example in 2 alternate methods of defining a schema :

The above is an alternative to the preceding opening tag would be to make the XMLSchema names the
default so that they do not need to be prefixed in the schema. Then the names in the target namespace
would need to be prefixed.

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DEFINING A SCHEMA INSTANCE :

An instance document normally defines its default namespace to be the one defined in its
schema.
For example, if the root element is planes, we could have
<planes
xmlns = “http://cs.uccs.edu/planeSchema” ... >
• The second attribute specification in the root element of an instance document is for
the schemaLocation attribute. This attribute is used to name the standard namespace
for instances, which includes the name XMLSchema-instance.
xmlns:xsi = “http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance”
• Third, the instance document must specify the filename of the schema in which the
default namespace is defined. This is accomplished with the schemaLocation attribute,
which takes two values: the namespace of the schema and the filename of the schema.
Combining everything, we get,

AN OVERVIEW OF DATA TYPES :

• There are two categories of user-defined schema data types: simple and complex.
• A simple data type is a data type whose content is restricted to strings. A simple type
cannot have attributes or include nested elements.
• A complex type can have attributes and include other data types as child elements.
• Data declarations in an XML schema can be either local or global.
• A local declaration is a declaration that appears inside an element that is a child of the
schema element.
• A global declaration is a declaration that appears as a child of the schema element.
Global elements are visible in the whole schema in which they are declared.
SIMPLE TYPES
Elements are defined in an XML schema with the element tag.
<xsd:element name = “engine” type = “xsd:string” />
An instance of the schema in which the engine element is defined could have the following
element:
<engine> inline six cylinder fuel injected </engine>
An element can be given a default value with the default attribute:

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• Constant values are given with the fixed attribute, as in the following example

• A simple user-defined data type is described in a simpleType element with the use of facets.
• Facets must be specified in the content of a restriction element, which gives the base type
name.
• The facets themselves are given in elements named for the facets: the value attribute specifies
the value of the facet.

COMPLEX TYPES
Complex types are defined with the complexType tag. The elements that are the content of an
element-only element must be contained in an ordered group, an unordered group, a choice, or a
named group. The sequence element is used to contain an ordered group of elements. Example:

• A complex type whose elements are an unordered group is defined in an all element. Elements
in all and sequence groups can include the minOccurs and maxOccurs attributes to specify the
numbers of occurrences.
• Example: <?xml version = “1.0” encoding = “utf-8”?>

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An XML instance that conforms to the planes.xsd schema is as follows:

For example, the year element could be defined as follows:

• With the year element defined globally, the sports_car element can be defined with a reference
to the year with the ref attribute:

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VALIDATING INSTANCES OF SCHEMAS

• XSV is an abbreviation for XML Schema Validator. If the schema and the instance document are
available on the Web, xsv can be used online, like the XHTML validation tool at the W3C Web
site. This tool can also be downloaded and run on any computer.
• The Web site for xsv is http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema#XSV.
• The output of xsv is an XML document. When the tool is run from the command line, the output
document appears on the screen with no formatting, so it is a bit difficult to read. The following
is the output of xsv run on planes.xml:

DISPLAYING RAW XML DOCUMENTS :

If an XML document is displayed without a style sheet that defines presentation styles for the
document’s tags, the displayed document will not have formatted content.
EXAMPLE : sampleDTD.html
DISPLAYING XML DOCUMENTS WITH CSS
EXAMPLE : 6A.XML AND 6A.CSS

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XSLT STYLE SHEETS

• The eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is a family of recommendations for defining the
presentation and transformations of XML documents.
• It consists of three related standards:
• XSL Transformations (XSLT),
• XML Path Language (XPath), and
• XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO).
• XSLT style sheets are used to transform XML documents into different forms or formats,
perhaps using different DTDs.
• One common use for XSLT is to transform XML documents into XHTML documents, primarily for
display. In the transformation of an XML document, the content of elements can be moved,
modified, sorted, and converted to attribute values, among other things.
• XSLT style sheets are XML documents, so they can be validated against DTDs
• They can even be transformed with the use of other XSLT style sheets.
• The XSLT standard is given at http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt.
• XPath is a language for expressions, which are often used to identify parts of XML documents,
such as specific elements that are in specific positions in the document or elements that have
particular attribute values.
• XPath is also used for XML document querying languages, such as XQL, and to build new XML
document structures with XPointer. The XPath standard is given at
http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath.
OVERVIEW OF XSLT :
• XSLT is actually a simple functional-style programming language.
• Included in XSLT are functions, parameters, names to which values can be bound, selection
constructs, and conditional expressions for multiple selection.
• XSLT processors take both an XML document and an XSLT document as input. T
• he XSLT document is the program to be executed; the XML document is the input data to the
program.
• Parts of the XML document are selected, possibly modified, and merged with parts of the XSLT
document to form a new document, which is sometimes called an XSL document.
• The transformation process used by an XSLT processor is shown in Figure 7.5.

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• An XSLT document consists primarily of one or more templates.

• Each template describes a function that is executed whenever the XSLT processor finds a match
to the template’s pattern.
• One XSLT model of processing XML data is called the template-driven model, which works well
when the data consists of multiple instances of highly regular data collections, as with files
containing records.
• XSLT can also deal with irregular and recursive data, using template fragments in what is called
the data-driven model.
• A single XSLT style sheet can include the mechanisms for both the template- and data-driven
models.
XSL TRANSFORMATIONS FOR PRESENTATION :
Consider a sample program: EXAMPLE ://6b.xml
An XML document that is to be used as data to an XSLT style sheet must include a processing
instruction to inform the XSLT processor that the style sheet is to be used. The form of this instruction
is as follows:
//6b.xsl


An XSLT style sheet is an XML document whose root element is the special-purpose element
stylesheet. The stylesheet tag defines namespaces as its attributes and encloses the collection
of elements that defines its transformations. It also identifies the document as an XSLT
document.
 <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl=”http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform”>
 In many XSLT documents, a template is included to match the root node of the XML document.
<xsl:template match="/">
 In many cases, the content of an element of the XML document is to be copied to the output
document. This is done with the value-of element, which uses a select attribute to specify the
element of the XML document whose contents are to be copied.
 <xsl:value-of select="name"/>
 The select attribute can specify any node of the XML document. This is an advantage of XSLT
formatting over CSS, in which the order of data as stored is the only possible order of display.
XML PROCESSORS
 The XML processor takes the XML document and DTD and processes the information so that it
may then be used by applications requesting the information.

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 The processor is a software module that reads the XML document to find out the structure and
content of the XML document.
 The structure and content can be derived by the processor because XML documents contain
self-explanatory data

THE PURPOSES OF XML PROCESSORS

• First, the processor must check the basic syntax of the document for well-formedness.
• Second, the processor must replace all references to entities in an XML document with their
definitions.
• Third, attributes in DTDs and elements in XML schemas can specify that their values in an XML
document have default values, which must be copied into the XML document during processing.
• Fourth, when a DTD or an XML schema is specified and the processor includes a validating
parser, the structure of the XML document must be checked to ensure that it is legitimate.
THE SAX APPROACH
• The Simple API for XML (SAX) approach to processing is called event processing.
• The processor scans the XML document from beginning to end.
• Every time a syntactic structure of the document is recognized, the processor signals an event to
the application by calling an event handler for the particular structure that was found.
• The syntactic structures of interest naturally include opening tags, attributes, text, and closing
tags.
• The interfaces that describe the event handlers form the SAX API.
THE DOM APPROACH
• The Document Object Model (DOM) is an application programming interface (API) for HTML and
XML documents.
• It defines the logical structure of documents and the way a document is accessed and
manipulated
• Properties of DOM
• Programmers can build documents, navigate their structure, and add, modify, or delete
elements and content.
• Provides a standard programming interface that can be used in a wide variety of
environments and applications.
• structural isomorphism.
• The DOM representation of an XML document has several advantages over the sequential listing
provided by SAX parsers.
• First, it has an obvious advantage if any part of the document must be accessed more than once
by the application.
• Second, if the application must perform any rearrangement of the elements of the document,
that can most easily be done if the whole document is accessible at the same time.
• Third, accesses to random parts of the document are possible.

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• Finally, because the parser sees the whole document before any processing takes place, this
approach avoids any processing of a document that is later found to be invalid.
WEB SERVICES
• A Web service is a method that resides and is executed on a Web server, but that can be
called from any computer on the Web. The standard technologies to support Web services are
WSDL, UDDI, SOAP, and XML.
• WSDL - It is used to describe the specific operations provided by the Web service, as well as
the protocols for the messages the Web service can send and receive.
• UDDI - also provides ways to query a Web services registry to determine what specific services
are available.
• SOAP - was originally an acronym for Standard Object Access Protocol, designed to describe
data objects.
• XML - provides a standard way for a group of users to define the structure of their data
documents, using a subject-specific mark-up language.

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