Audience
Webmasters and others interested in taking advantage of XML's create-one, use-many-times methodologies.
Prerequisites
Participants should have a general knowledge of HTML and JavaScript. Students with programming experience but no experience in JavaScript will still be able to write basic pages and XML extracts.
Duration
2 days.
Course Objectives
XML data can be 'attached' to HTML documents when they are sent to the browser, thus, allowing you to use JavaScript to manipulate the data and present the user with a variety of different representations of their data without any additional server-side processing.
In this course, students are introduced to the basic concepts of XML, attaching XML files to HTML files, and writing JavaScript to parse and present the XML data in the browser.
Course Content
History and Development
- Markup languages
- SGML
- HTML
- XML
Applications/Uses
- Middle-tier for data transfer
- Intelligent data in documents
- Single source-multiple output
- Delivering intelligent data to the browser
XML Tools
- XML viewers
- XML parsers
- XML editors
XML Syntax
- Tags
- Elements
- Attributes
- Comments
- Processing Instructions
- Exercise: Create a simple document using XML markup
XML Structure
- Well-formed structure
- Valid structure
- DTDs and Schemas - why and when to use them
- Exercise: Check if our document is well-formed
Data and Document Structure
- Components of a document
- Components of a data structure
- Exercise: Analyze documents and data sets in plain English
Additional XML Concepts
- XML namespaces
- XML pointers
- XML links
DOM (Document Object Model)
- Introduction
- Parsing
- Navigation Basics
Using JavaScript to Access the DOM
- DOM related JavaScript commands
- Using XML data islands
- Parsing the XML document
- Finding the root element and navigating through the document
- Recursive processing inside the DOM
- Exercise: Write several JavaScript routines to extract and display a variety of data based on user request