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The XML Companion, 2nd Edition
- By Neil Bradley
- Published Dec 15, 1999 by Addison-Wesley Professional.
- Copyright 2000
- Dimensions: 6-3/4x9-1/4
- Pages: 576
- Edition: 2nd
- Book
- ISBN-10: 0-201-67486-6
- ISBN-13: 978-0-201-67486-6
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XML is one of the most exciting recent developments to hit the World Wide Web, enabling the further expansion of Web technology into new domains of content management, audience targetted presentation and distributed document processing. If you’re a current or potential XML user looking for just one reference to get you up to speed on XML with clarity, comprehensive coverage and precision, then this book will be your essential and constant companion.
Building on the success of the first edition of The XMLCompanion, Neil Bradley has updated this accessible, in-depth reference to release 1.0 of the XML standard to incorporate the results of the high degree of activity that has surrounded the standard since its release. This edition now contains the complementary standards that have been released, including detailed coverage of DOM 1.0, SAX 1.0, CSS 2 and NameSpaces 1.0, as well as describing the latest, most stable drafts of XSL & XSLT, Xlink & Xpointer.
The XML Companion:
• provides an accessible, comprehensive description of each XML feature
• does not assume experience of either HTML or SGML
• features a series of ‘Road Map’ charts that reveal the structure of the XML standard
• contains an extensive glossary of XML and related terminology
•provides up-to-date coverage of all complementary standards
New to this edition:
NEW – Detailed coverage of DOM 1.0, SAX 1.0, CSS 2 and NameSpaces 1.0
NEW – Describes latest drafts of XSL & XSLT, Xlink & XPointer
NEW – Covers recently proposed standards – XHTML and XML Catalog
0201674866B04062001
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Handy reference book,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Xml Companion (Paperback)
All reference books should be this short. The XML Companion is generally clear and concise and does a nice job of relating XML to its cousins SGML and HTML. The examples are easy to follow, although the diagrams are often messy--too many arrows pointing this way and that, obscuring parts of the drawing. The charts, tables, and glossary are extremely handy.Unfortunately, two chapters (XLL and XSL) are based on specifications that haven't even become official W3C recommendations yet--why waste the paper and ink on something you know will be outdated by the time the book appears in print? Apparently some marketing bozo at Addison-Wesley decided this was the way to go. Worse, despite its helpful content, every chapter of this book is riddled with typos and other lapses in copyediting and proofreading, which is an embarrassment to the author and a disgrace to the publisher. One expects better of Addison-Wesley--or at least I used to. The proofreader of this book should be... Read more
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Useful and comprehensive, By
This review is from: The XML Companion (3rd Edition) (Paperback)
Bradley's book is a pretty complete guide to XML and related technologies. The main chapters are almost tutorial in style, with plenty of code examples to follow. The end of the book contains a small reference section. The topics covered are XML, XSL, XSLT, DOM, SAX, XPath, Schemas, XLink, XHTML, and CSS. Discussions are for the most part clear and accurate. I have two main complaints about Bradley. First, the prose, while accurate, is often overly verbose. It could be written more concisely and compactly. Second, each chapter is broken into sections, but the sections are not numbered, so it is difficult to locate material in the text. The main advantage is the comprehensive general coverage of XML-related technologies. Buying this one book will arm you with the knowledge to develop XML applications and content, and it will save you money. If you have very specific needs, you may need to supplement Bradley with another more focused text that delves deeper into a particular...
Read more
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Wonderful book, clear and to the point for XML professionals, By
This review is from: The XML Companion (3rd Edition) (Paperback)
This book is clearly not for a beginner, nor should it be. Many reviews give it less than five stars due to the fact that it's a bad tutorial. Well it wasn't designed as one, as you should see in the title XML **Companion**. It's designed as a thorough reference of XML and related technologies. Neil is really up to date with his stuff. I couldn't find another book, (and I've skimmed through all of them), that covers everything. Coverage of technical issues like white space normalization, Relax, Trex, Relax NG, etc... It's wondeful.Please don't buy this book as a tutorial, but rather as a desktop reference. It's a must on all XML programmer's bookshelves. |
Preface
Preface
The Extensible Markup Language is a powerful publishing and document interchange format. Developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, it was released, to widespread acclaim, in 1998. XML has a superficial resemblance to HTML, the established language of the Web, but information held in this format is self-describing - it can be extracted, manipulated and formatted to the requirements of any target audience or publishing medium.
XML should be of interest to HTML designers who need more flexibility to manage and customize their documents, to SGML users seeking advanced yet modestly priced applications, and to software developers requiring a flexible storage or interchange format that has powerful supporting tools.
The XML Companion serves the programmer, analyst or consultant involved in the management, processing, transfer or publication of XML documents. Detailed study of XML is supported by the inclusion of cross-referenced 'road maps' of the building blocks that comprise the standard, and an extensive glossary. Related standards for cataloguing, linking and styling XML files are also covered in detail.
This edition
The first edition of this book was completed within weeks of the release of the XML standard. Since that time, no significant pressure to modify or enhance the core standard has emerged. Justification for a new edition of this book therefore rests upon the high degree of activity surrounding XML. Complementary standards for processing, presenting and merging XML data have since been released, and this edition provides detailed coverage of DOM 1.0, SAX 1.0, CSS 2 and Namespaces 1.0. Other standards have progressed, but are still being refined, so this edition simply describes later, more stable drafts of XSL (now divided into XSL and XSLT) and XLL (now divided into XLink and XPointer). Other proposed standards have only very recently emerged. The next version of HTML (XHTML) will be an application of XML (instead of SGML), and the XML Catalog proposal defines a standard scheme for managing the mapping of entity identifiers to local system files. A new scheme for navigating around XML documents, called XPath, will be utilised by the linking and styling standards.
This opportunity has been taken to rectify a number of minor syntactic and grammatical mistakes, as well as a few factual errors, and thanks are due to readers of the first edition for highlighting many of these issues.
Very little material from the first edition has been omitted, so the new book is a little larger than before. Despite this, it is hoped that the book can still serve as a 'companion' for those who are constantly on the move.
Acknowledgements
A repeated thanks to all those mentioned in the first edition of this book, as their contributions remain relevant. In addition, a number of readers of the first edition have contributed suggestions and observations that have helped improve the quality of this work, and their efforts are appreciated. Finally, thanks once again to Adobe for FrameMaker+SGML (which was used both in the preparation and publication of this book).
Feedback
Comments and suggestions for a possible future edition are welcome. They should be sent to the author, who can be found at neil@bradley.co.uk. Updates, additions and corrections can be obtained from the author's Web page, located at 'http://www.bradley.co.uk', which also contains links to various XML and SGML related sites.
Neil Bradley
August1999
0201674866P04062001
Table of Contents
Preface.
1. Using This book.
2. Overview.
3. Document markup.
4. Physical structure (entities).
5. Logical structure (the DTD).
6. Document modelling (DTD design).
7. White space issues.
8. Namespaces.
9. Processing XML data.
10. Managing XML documents.
11. Navigating with (URL and XPath).
12. Hypertext links (XLink and XPointer).
13. Document formatting (XSL and XSLT).
14. SAX 1.0.
15. DOM 1.0.
16. Character sets.
17. Cascading style sheets (CSS).
18. The Internet and HTML.
19. SGML.
20. Charts and tables.
21. XML road map.
Glossary.
Index. 0201674866T04062001
Book
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