Sams Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days

By Steven Holzner

• Table of Contents
  • About the Author
  • Acknowledgments
  • We Want to Hear from You!
  • Introduction
  • Part I: At a Glance
  • Day 1. Welcome to XML
  • Day 2. Creating XML Documents
    • Choosing an XML Editor
    • Using XML Browsers
    • Using XML Validators
    • Creating XML Documents Piece by Piece
    • Creating Prologs
    • Creating an XML Declaration
    • Creating XML Comments
    • Creating Processing Instructions
    • Creating Tags and Elements
    • Creating CDATA Sections
    • Handling Entities
    • Summary
    • Q&A
    • Workshop
  • Day 3. Creating Well-Formed XML Documents
  • Day 4. Creating Valid XML Documents: DTDs
  • Declaring Attributes in DTDs
  • Day 6. Creating Valid XML Documents: XML Schemas
  • Day 7. Creating Types in XML Schemas
  • Part I. In Review
  • Day 8. Formatting XML by Using Cascading Style Sheets
  • Day 9. Formatting XML by Using XSLT
  • Day 10. Working with XSL Formatting Objects
  • Part II. In Review
  • Part III: At a Glance
  • Day 11. Extending HTML with XHTML
  • Day 12. Putting XHTML to Work
  • Day 13. Creating Graphics and Multimedia: SVG and SMIL
  • Day 14. Handling XLinks, XPointers, and XForms
  • Part III. In Review
  • Part IV: At a Glance
  • Day 15. Using JavaScript and XML
  • Day 16. Using Java and .NET: DOM
  • Day 17. Using Java and .NET: SAX
  • Day 18. Working with SOAP and RDF
  • Part IV. In Review
  • Part V: At a Glance
  • Day 19. Handling XML Data Binding
  • Day 20. Working with XML and Databases
  • Day 21. Handling XML in .NET
  • Part V. In Review
  • Appendix A. Quiz Answers

Q&A

1. What's the difference between character data and parsed character data?

   Character data is simply verbatim text data from an XML document. Parsed character data is text data where the XML processor has replaced any entity references with the entities themselves. Character data is referred to as CDATA (as in CDATA sections), and parsed character data is referred to as PCDATA (as we'll see when we create DTDs in Day 4).

2. My text editor says it can save documents in plain text format, but says nothing about Unicode or UCS. Will that be OK when I write my XML documents?

   Yes, your text editor is most likely writing documents in ASCII, which is a subset of Unicode, which itself is a subset of UCS. ASCII characters use the same codes in compressed Unicode, UTF-8, so you should specify the UTF-8 encoding and an XML processor should have no trouble reading your document if you save it as plain text.

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