Sams Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days
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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
- 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
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Part I. In Review
- Well-Formed Documents
- Valid Documents
- Part II: At a Glance
- 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
Part II: At a Glance
Formatting XML Documents
In Part II, you're going to start working with the actual data inside XML documents, but without using programming. You're going to see three ways of formatting XML data in the coming three days.
You'll start by using cascading style sheets (CSS), which are specified by the W3C for formatting both XML and HTML. You can do a lot to format the appearance of XML documents by using CSS. However, CSS aren't native XML.
You'll also take a look at formatting XML by using Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT); XSLT is native XML. By using XSLT you can extract data from XML documents, process it, and create new HTML, RTF, text, and files, as well as files of other formats, including new XML documents—all without programming. However, you can't really format the appearance of XML data directly by using XSLT.
The general version of Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) that uses special formatting objects is called XSL-FO, and it can format data down to the smallest spaces and font choices. You'll see XSL-FO in Day 10; although XSL-FO gives you a handle on just about all aspects of displaying XML data, it's pretty complex to work with.
Day 8. Formatting XML by Using Cascading Style Sheets | Next Section
