XML-Rules to Encoding

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a form at which is both human-readable and machine-readable. It is defined by the W3C's XML 1.0 Specification and by several other related specifications, all of which are free open standards.

The design goals of XML emphasize simplicity, generality and usability across the Internet. It is a textual data format with strong support via Unicode for different human languages. Although the design of XML focuses on documents, it is widely used for the representation of arbitrary data structures such as those used in web services.

History :

XML is an application profile of SGML (ISO 8879).

The versatility of SGML for dynamic information display was understood by early digital media publishers in the late 1980s prior to the rise of the Internet.By the mid-1990s some practitioners of SGML had gained experience with the then-new World Wide Web, and believed that SGML offered solutions to some of the problems the Web was likely to face as it grew. Dan Connolly added SGML to the list of W3C's activities when he joined the staff in 1995; work began in mid-1996 when Sun Microsystems engineer Jon Bosak developed a charter and recruited collaborators. Bosak was well connected in the small community of people who had experience both in SGML and the Web.^[27]

XML was compiled by a working group of eleven members, supported by a (roughly) 150-member Interest Group. Technical debate took place on the Interest Group mailing list and issues were resolved by consensus or, when that failed, majority vote of the Working Group. A record of design decisions and their rationales was compiled by Michael Sperberg-McQueen on December 4, 1997. James Clark served as Technical Lead of the Working Group, notably contributing the empty-element "<empty />" syntax and the name "XML". Other names that had been put forward for consideration included "MAGMA" (Minimal Architecture for Generalized Markup Applications), "SLIM" (Structured Language for Internet Markup) and "MGML" (Minimal Generalized Markup Language). The co-editors of the specification were originally Tim Bray and Michael Sperberg-McQueen. Halfway through the project Bray accepted a consulting engagement with Netscape, provoking vociferous protests from Microsoft. Bray was temporarily asked to resign the editorship. This led to intense dispute in the Working Group, eventually solved by the appointment of Microsoft's Jean Paoli as a third co-editor.

Sources :

XML is a profile of an ISO standard SGML, and most of XML comes from SGML unchanged. From SGML comes the separation of logical and physical structures (elements and entities), the availability of grammar-based validation (DTDs), the separation of data and metadata (elements and attributes), mixed content, the separation of processing from representation (processing instructions), and the default angle-bracket syntax. Removed were the SGML declaration (XML has a fixed delimiter set and adopts Unicode as the document character set).

Other sources of technology for XML were the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), which defined a profile of SGML for use as a "transfer syntax"; and HTML, in which elements were synchronous with their resource, document character sets were separate from resource encoding, the xml:lang attribute was invented, and (like HTTP) metadata accompanied the resource rather than being needed at the declaration of a link. The Extended Reference Concrete Syntax (ERCS) project of the SPREAD (Standardization Project Regarding East Asian Documents) project of the ISO-related China/Japan/Korea Document Processing expert group was the basis of XML 1.0's naming rules; SPREAD also introduced hexadecimal numeric character references and the concept of references to make available all Unicode characters. To support ERCS, XML and HTML better, the SGML standard IS 8879 was revised in 1996 and 1998 with WebSGML Adaptations. The XML header followed that of ISO HyTime.

Versions :

There are two current versions of XML. The first (XML 1.0) was initially defined in 1998. It has undergone minor revisions since then, without being given a new version number, and is currently in its fifth edition, as published on November 26, 2008. It is widely implemented and still recommended for general use.

The second (XML 1.1) was initially published on February 4, 2004, the same day as XML 1.0 Third Edition, and is currently in its second edition, as published on August 16, 2006. It contains features (some contentious) that are intended to make XML easier to use in certain cases. The main changes are to enable the use of line-ending characters used on EBCDIC platforms, and the use of scripts and characters absent from Unicode 3.2. XML 1.1 is not very widely implemented and is recommended for use only by those who need its unique features.

Prior to its fifth edition release, XML 1.0 differed from XML 1.1 in having stricter requirements for characters available for use in element and attribute names and unique identifiers: in the first four editions of XML 1.0 the characters were exclusively enumerated using a specific version of the Unicode standard (Unicode 2.0 to Unicode 3.2.) The fifth edition substitutes the mechanism of XML 1.1, which is more future-proof but reduces redundancy. The approach taken in the fifth edition of XML 1.0 and in all editions of XML 1.1 is that only certain characters are forbidden in names, and everything else is allowed, in order to accommodate the use of suitable name characters in future versions of Unicode. In the fifth edition, XML names may contain characters in the Balinese, Cham, or Phoenician scripts among many others which have been added to Unicode since Unicode 3.2.

Almost any Unicode code point can be used in the character data and attribute values of an XML 1.0 or 1.1 document, even if the character corresponding to the code point is not defined in the current version of Unicode. In character data and attribute values, XML 1.1 allows the use of more control characters than XML 1.0, but, for "robustness", most of the control characters introduced in XML 1.1 must be expressed as numeric character references (and #x7F through #x9F, which had been allowed in XML 1.0, are in XML 1.1 even required to be expressed as numeric character references). Among the supported control characters in XML 1.1 are two line break codes that must be treated as whitespace. Whitespace characters are the only control codes that can be written directly.

There has been discussion of an XML 2.0, although no organization has announced plans for work on such a project. XML-SW (SW for skunkworks), written by one of the original developers of XML, contains some proposals for what an XML 2.0 might look like: elimination of DTDs from syntax, integration of namespaces, XML Base and XML Information Set (infoset) into the base standard.

Applications of XML :

As of 2009, hundreds of document formats using XML syntax have been developed, including RSS, Atom, SOAP, and XHTML. XML-based formats have become the default for many office-productivity tools, including Microsoft Office (Office Open XML), OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice (OpenDocument), and Apple's iWork. XML has also been employed as the base language for communication protocols, such as XMPP. Applications for the Microsoft .NET Framework use XML files for configuration. Apple has an implementation of a registry based on XML.^[8]

Key terminology :

The material in this section is based on the XML Specification. This is not an exhaustive list of all the constructs that appear in XML; it provides an introduction to the key constructs most often encountered in day-to-day use.

(Unicode) character

By definition, an XML document is a string of characters. Almost every legal Unicode character may appear in an XML document.

Processor and application

The processor analyzes the markup and passes structured information to an application. The specification places requirements on what an XML processor must do and not do, but the application is outside its scope. The processor (as the specification calls it) is often referred to colloquially as an XML parser.

Markup and content

The characters making up an XML document are divided into markup and content, which may be distinguished by the application of simple syntactic rules. Generally, strings that constitute markup either begin with the character < and end with a >, or they begin with the character & and end with a ;. Strings of characters that are not markup are content. However, in a CDATA section, the delimiters <![CDATA[ and ]]> are classified as markup, while the text between them is classified as content. In addition, whitespace before and after the outermost element is classified as markup.

Tag

A markup construct that begins with < and ends with >. Tags come in three flavors:

• start-tags; for example: <section>
• end-tags; for example: </section>
• empty-element tags; for example: <line-break />

Element

A logical document component which either begins with a start-tag and ends with a matching end-tag or consists only of an empty-element tag. The characters between the start- and end-tags, if any, are the element's content, and may contain markup, including other elements, which are called child elements. An example of an element is<Greeting>Hello, world.</Greeting>. Another is <line-break />.

Attribute

A markup construct consisting of a name/value pair that exists within a start-tag or empty-element tag. In the example (below) the element img has two attributes, src and alt:

<img src="madonna.jpg" alt='Foligno Madonna, by Raphael' />

Another example would be

<step number="3">Connect A to B.</step>

where the name of the attribute is "number" and the value is "3".

An XML attribute can only have a single value and each attribute can appear at most once on each element. In the common situation where a list of multiple values is desired, this must be done by encoding the list into a well-formed XML attribute  with some format beyond what XML defines itself. Usually this is either a comma or semi-colon delimited list or, if the individual values are known not to contain spaces, a space-delimited list can be used.

<div class="inner greeting-box" >Hello!</div>

where the attribute "class" has both the value "inner greeting-box" and also indicates the two CSS class names "inner" and "greeting-box".

XML declaration

XML documents may begin by declaring some information about themselves, as in the following example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

Schemas and validation :

In addition to being well-formed, an XML document may be valid. This means that it contains a reference to a Document Type Definition (DTD), and that its elements and attributes are declared in that DTD and follow the grammatical rules for them that the DTD specifies.

XML processors are classified as validating or non-validating depending on whether or not they check XML documents for validity. A processor that discovers a validity error must be able to report it, but may continue normal processing.

A DTD is an example of a schema or grammar. Since the initial publication of XML 1.0, there has been substantial work in the area of schema languages for XML. Such schema languages typically constrain the set of elements that may be used in a document, which attributes may be applied to them, the order in which they may appear, and the allowable parent/child relationships.

Document Type Definition :

Main article: Document Type Definition

The oldest schema language for XML is the Document Type Definition (DTD), inherited from SGML.

DTDs have the following benefits:

• DTD support is ubiquitous due to its inclusion in the XML 1.0 standard.
• DTDs are terse compared to element-based schema languages and consequently present more information in a single screen.
• DTDs allow the declaration of standard public entity sets for publishing characters.
• DTDs define a document type rather than the types used by a namespace, thus grouping all constraints for a document in a single collection.

DTDs have the following limitations:

• They have no explicit support for newer features of XML, most importantly namespaces.
• They lack expressiveness. XML DTDs are simpler than SGML DTDs and there are certain structures that cannot be expressed with regular grammars. DTDs only support rudimentary datatypes.
• They lack readability. DTD designers typically make heavy use of parameter entities (which behave essentially as textual macros), which make it easier to define complex grammars, but at the expense of clarity.
• They use a syntax based on regular expression syntax, inherited from SGML, to describe the schema. Typical XML APIs such as SAX do not attempt to offer applications a structured representation of the syntax, so it is less accessible to programmers than an element-based syntax may be.

Two peculiar features that distinguish DTDs from other schema types are the syntactic support for embedding a DTD within XML documents and for defining entities, which are arbitrary fragments of text and/or markup that the XML processor inserts in the DTD itself and in the XML document wherever they are referenced, like character escapes.

DTD technology is still used in many applications because of its ubiquity.

XML Schema :

Main article: XML Schema (W3C)

A newer schema language, described by the W3C as the successor of DTDs, is XML Schema, often referred to by the initialism for XML Schema instances, XSD (XML Schema Definition). XSDs are far more powerful than DTDs in describing XML languages. They use a rich datatyping system and allow for more detailed constraints on an XML document's logical structure. XSDs also use an XML-based format, which makes it possible to use ordinary XML tools to help process them.

xs:schema element that defines a schema:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>

<xs:schema xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">

</xs:schema>

Programming interfaces :

The design goals of XML include, "It shall be easy to write programs which process XML documents. Despite this, the XML specification contains almost no information about how programmers might go about doing such processing. The XML Infoset specification provides a vocabulary to refer to the constructs within an XML document, but also does not provide any guidance on how to access this information. A variety of APIs for accessing XML have been developed and used, and some have been standardized.

Existing APIs for XML processing tend to fall into these categories:

• Stream-oriented APIs accessible from a programming language, for example SAX and StAX.
• Tree-traversal APIs accessible from a programming language, for example DOM.
• XML data binding, which provides an automated translation between an XML document and programming-language objects.
• Declarative transformation languages such as XSLT and XQuery.

Simple API for XML :

Simple API for XML (SAX) is a lexical, event-driven interface in which a document is read serially and its contents are reported as callbacks to various methods on a handler object of the user's design. SAX is fast and efficient to implement, but difficult to use for extracting information at random from the XML, since it tends to burden the application author with keeping track of what part of the document is being processed. It is better suited to situations in which certain types of information are always handled the same way, no matter where they occur in the document.

Pull parsing :

Pull parsing treats the document as a series of items which are read in sequence using the Iterator design pattern. This allows for writing of recursive-descent parsers in which the structure of the code performing the parsing mirrors the structure of the XML being parsed, and intermediate parsed results can be used and accessed as local variables within the methods performing the parsing, or passed down (as method parameters) into lower-level methods, or returned (as method return values) to higher-level methods. Examples of pull parsers include StAX in the Java programming language, XMLPullParser in Smalltalk, XMLReader in PHP, ElementTree.iterparse in Python, System.Xml.XmlReader in the .NET Framework, and the DOM traversal API (NodeIterator and TreeWalker).

A pull parser creates an iterator that sequentially visits the various elements, attributes, and data in an XML document. Code which uses this iterator can test the current item (to tell, for example, whether it is a start or end element, or text), and inspect its attributes (local name, namespace, values of XML attributes, value of text, etc.), and can also move the iterator to the next item. The code can thus extract information from the document as it traverses it. The recursive-descent approach tends to lend itself to keeping data as typed local variables in the code doing the parsing, while SAX, for instance, typically requires a parser to manually maintain intermediate data within a stack of elements which are parent elements of the element being parsed. Pull-parsing code can be more straightforward to understand and maintain than SAX parsing code.

Document Object Model :

The Document Object Model (DOM) is an interface-oriented application programming interface that allows for navigation of the entire document as if it were a tree of nodeobjects representing the document's contents. A DOM document can be created by a parser, or can be generated manually by users (with limitations). Data types in DOM nodes are abstract; implementations provide their own programming language-specific bindings. DOM implementations tend to be memory intensive, as they generally require the entire document to be loaded into memory and constructed as a tree of objects before access is allowed.

Data binding :

Another form of XML processing API is XML data binding, where XML data are made available as a hierarchy of custom, strongly typed classes, in contrast to the generic objects created by a Document Object Model parser. This approach simplifies code development, and in many cases allows problems to be identified at compile time rather than run-time. Example data binding systems include the Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) and XML Serialization in .NET.^[20]

XML as data type  :

XML has appeared as a first-class data type in other languages. The ECMAScript for XML (E4X) extension to the ECMAScript/JavaScript language explicitly defines two specific objects (XML and XMLList) for JavaScript, which support XML document nodes and XML node lists as distinct objects and use a dot-notation specifying parent-child relationships. E4X is supported by the Mozilla 2.5+ browsers (though now deprecated) and Adobe Actionscript, but has not been adopted more universally. Similar notations are used in Microsoft's LINQ implementation for Microsoft .NET 3.5 and above, and in Scala (which uses the Java VM). The open-source xmlsh application, which provides a Linux-like shell with special features for XML manipulation, similarly treats XML as a data type, using the <[ ]> notation. The Resource Description Framework defines a data type rdf:XMLLiteral to hold wrapped, canonical XML.