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 VBScript. Students with programming experience but no experience in VBScript 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 VBScript 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 learn the basic concepts of XML, attaching XML files to HTML files, and writing VBScript 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 VBScript to Access the DOM
- DOM related VBScript 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 VBScript routines to extract and display a variety of data based on user request.