What You Should Already Know: XML Was Designed To Transport and Store Data. HTML Was Designed To Display Data
What You Should Already Know: XML Was Designed To Transport and Store Data. HTML Was Designed To Display Data
What You Should Already Know: XML Was Designed To Transport and Store Data. HTML Was Designed To Display Data
What is XML?
• XML stands for EXtensible Markup Language
• XML is a markup language much like HTML
• XML was designed to carry data, not to display data
• XML tags are not predefined. You must define your own tags
• XML is designed to be self-descriptive
• XML is a W3C Recommendation
<note>
<to>Tove</to>
<from>Jani</from>
<heading>Reminder</heading>
<body>Don't forget me this weekend!</body>
</note>
The note above is quite self descriptive. It has sender and receiver information, it also has a
heading and a message body.
But still, this XML document does not DO anything. It is just information wrapped in tags.
Someone must write a piece of software to send, receive or display it.
XML is Everywhere
XML is now as important for the Web as HTML was to the foundation of the Web.
XML is the most common tool for data transmissions between all sorts of applications.
XML is used in many aspects of web development, often to simplify data storage
and sharing.
XML Tree
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XML documents form a tree structure that starts at "the root" and branches to
"the leaves".
The first line is the XML declaration. It defines the XML version (1.0) and the encoding used
(ISO-8859-1 = Latin-1/West European character set).
The next line describes the root element of the document (like saying: "this document is a
note"):
<note>
The next 4 lines describe 4 child elements of the root (to, from, heading, and body):
<to>Tove</to>
<from>Jani</from>
<heading>Reminder</heading>
<body>Don't forget me this weekend!</body>
And finally the last line defines the end of the root element:
</note>
You can assume, from this example, that the XML document contains a note to Tove from
Jani.
Don't you agree that XML is pretty self-descriptive?
<root>
<child>
<subchild>.....</subchild>
</child>
</root>
The terms parent, child, and sibling are used to describe the relationships between
elements. Parent elements have children. Children on the same level are called siblings
(brothers or sisters).
All elements can have text content and attributes (just like in HTML).
Example:
The image above represents one book in the XML below:
<bookstore>
<book category="COOKING">
<title lang="en">Everyday Italian</title>
<author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>
<year>2005</year>
<price>30.00</price>
</book>
<book category="CHILDREN">
<title lang="en">Harry Potter</title>
<author>J K. Rowling</author>
<year>2005</year>
<price>29.99</price>
</book>
<book category="WEB">
<title lang="en">Learning XML</title>
<author>Erik T. Ray</author>
<year>2003</year>
<price>39.95</price>
</book>
</bookstore>
The root element in the example is <bookstore>. All <book> elements in the document are
contained within <bookstore>.
The <book> element has 4 children: <title>,< author>, <year>, <price>.
<p>This is a paragraph
<p>This is another paragraph
In XML, it is illegal to omit the closing tag. All elements must have a closing tag:
<p>This is a paragraph</p>
<p>This is another paragraph</p>
Note: You might have noticed from the previous example that the XML declaration did not
have a closing tag. This is not an error. The declaration is not a part of the XML document
itself, and it has no closing tag.
<Message>This is incorrect</message>
<message>This is correct</message>
Note: "Opening and closing tags" are often referred to as "Start and end tags". Use
whatever you prefer. It is exactly the same thing.
In the example above, "Properly nested" simply means that since the <i> element is
opened inside the <b> element, it must be closed inside the <b> element.
XML Documents Must Have a Root Element
XML documents must contain one element that is the parent of all other elements. This
element is called the root element.
<root>
<child>
<subchild>.....</subchild>
</child>
</root>
<note date=12/11/2007>
<to>Tove</to>
<from>Jani</from>
</note>
<note date="12/11/2007">
<to>Tove</to>
<from>Jani</from>
</note>
The error in the first document is that the date attribute in the note element is not quoted.
Entity References
Some characters have a special meaning in XML.
If you place a character like "<" inside an XML element, it will generate an error because
the parser interprets it as the start of a new element.
This will generate an XML error:
To avoid this error, replace the "<" character with an entity reference:
<message>if salary < 1000 then</message>
Note: Only the characters "<" and "&" are strictly illegal in XML. The greater than character
is legal, but it is a good habit to replace it.
Comments in XML
The syntax for writing comments in XML is similar to that of HTML.
<!-- This is a comment -->
XML Elements
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An XML document contains XML Elements.
<bookstore>
<book category="CHILDREN">
<title>Harry Potter</title>
<author>J K. Rowling</author>
<year>2005</year>
<price>29.99</price>
</book>
<book category="WEB">
<title>Learning XML</title>
<author>Erik T. Ray</author>
<year>2003</year>
<price>39.95</price>
</book>
</bookstore>
In the example above, <bookstore> and <book> have element contents, because they
contain other elements. <book> also has an attribute (category="CHILDREN"). <title>,
<author>, <year>, and <price> have text content because they contain text.
<note>
<to>Tove</to>
<from>Jani</from>
<body>Don't forget me this weekend!</body>
</note>
Let's imagine that we created an application that extracted the <to>, <from>, and <body>
elements from the XML document to produce this output:
MESSAGE
To: Tove
From: Jani
Don't forget me this weekend!
Imagine that the author of the XML document added some extra information to it:
<note>
<date>2008-01-10</date>
<to>Tove</to>
<from>Jani</from>
<heading>Reminder</heading>
<body>Don't forget me this weekend!</body>
</note>
XML Attributes
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XML Attributes
In HTML, attributes provide additional information about elements:
<img src="computer.gif">
<a href="demo.asp">
Attributes often provide information that is not a part of the data. In the example below, the
file type is irrelevant to the data, but can be important to the software that wants to
manipulate the element:
<file type="gif">computer.gif</file>
<person sex="female">
or like this:
<person sex='female'>
If the attribute value itself contains double quotes you can use single quotes, like in this
example:
<person sex="female">
<firstname>Anna</firstname>
<lastname>Smith</lastname>
</person>
<person>
<sex>female</sex>
<firstname>Anna</firstname>
<lastname>Smith</lastname>
</person>
In the first example sex is an attribute. In the last, sex is an element. Both examples
provide the same information.
There are no rules about when to use attributes or when to use elements. Attributes are
handy in HTML. In XML my advice is to avoid them. Use elements instead.
My Favorite Way
The following three XML documents contain exactly the same information:
A date attribute is used in the first example:
<note date="10/01/2008">
<to>Tove</to>
<from>Jani</from>
<heading>Reminder</heading>
<body>Don't forget me this weekend!</body>
</note>
<note>
<date>10/01/2008</date>
<to>Tove</to>
<from>Jani</from>
<heading>Reminder</heading>
<body>Don't forget me this weekend!</body>
</note>
<note>
<date>
<day>10</day>
<month>01</month>
<year>2008</year>
</date>
<to>Tove</to>
<from>Jani</from>
<heading>Reminder</heading>
<body>Don't forget me this weekend!</body>
</note>
The id attributes above are for identifying the different notes. It is not a part of the note
itself.
What I'm trying to say here is that metadata (data about data) should be stored as
attributes, and the data itself should be stored as elements.
XML Validation
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The DOCTYPE declaration in the example above, is a reference to an external DTD file. The
content of the file is shown in the paragraph below.
XML DTD
The purpose of a DTD is to define the structure of an XML document. It defines the structure
with a list of legal elements:
<!DOCTYPE note
[
<!ELEMENT note (to,from,heading,body)>
<!ELEMENT to (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT from (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT heading (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT body (#PCDATA)>
]>
If you want to study DTD, you will find our DTD tutorial on our homepage.
XML Schema
W3C supports an XML-based alternative to DTD, called XML Schema:
<xs:element name="note">
<xs:complexType>
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element name="to" type="xs:string"/>
<xs:element name="from" type="xs:string"/>
<xs:element name="heading" type="xs:string"/>
<xs:element name="body" type="xs:string"/>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
If you want to study XML Schema, you will find our Schema tutorial on our homepage.
XML Validator
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Note: This only checks if your XML is "Well formed". If you want to validate your XML
against a DTD, see the last paragraph on this page.
Validate
Bottom of Form
Note: If you get an "Access denied" error, it's because your browser security does not allow
file access across domains.
The file "note_error.xml" demonstrates your browsers error handling. If you want see an
error free message, substitute the "note_error.xml" with "cd_catalog.xml".
Note: Only Internet Explorer will actually check your XML against the DTD. Firefox, Mozilla,
Netscape, and Opera will not.
- <note>
<to>Tove</to>
<from>Jani</from>
<heading>Reminder</heading>
With CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) you can add display information to an XML
document.