Day 15. Using JavaScript and XML

Starting today, we're going to begin working with programming and XML. Today's discussion focuses on JavaScript and XML, and here's a list of today's topics:

  • Using the W3C XML DOM
  • Using DOM objects
  • Using XML data islands
  • Accessing data in XML documents
  • Parsing XML documents
  • Validating XML documents by using a DTD

NOTE

Today you'll use JavaScript because it's one of the languages commonly used with XML. If you don't know JavaScript but have programmed before, you should be able to easily pick up JavaScript from what you do today. You can also find plenty of JavaScript resources online; a casual search for "JavaScript tutorial" turns up more than 17,000 matches.

The official documentation for JavaScript 1.3 is at http://developer.netscape.com/docs/manuals/index.html, and the official documentation for JavaScript 2.0 is at http://developer.netscape.com/docs/manuals/index.html. The official documentation for JScript 5.6, the version used in Internet Explorer, is currently at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/script56/html/js56jsoriJScript.asp (note, however, that this is a Microsoft URL, and Microsoft reorganizes its sites continuously, which means that by the time you read this book, the URL may be obsolete).

The W3C created the Document Object Model ( DOM ) to let you work with XML documents. Using the DOM is a way of looking at XML documents in programming terms, as you'll see today. Before the DOM standardized things, each XML processor had its own way of handling XML—and all the processors kept changing. Now, things have quieted down and stabilized because of the W3C DOM, and we'll start discussing it today.

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