Introduction to XPath
XPath, XML Path Language, is an expression language for addressing portions of an XML document or navigating within an XML document. We can also get values of elements and attributes using XPath. XPath...
View ArticleXML Basics
XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. XML is used to aid the exchange of data. The language makes it possible to define data in a structured way. XML tags are not predefined like HTML. XML lets...
View ArticleNavigating Input Documents Using Paths
Path expressions are used to navigate input documents to select elements and attributes of interest. This chapter explains how to use path expressions to select elements and attributes from an input...
View ArticleUsing Predicates with XQuery
Predicates Predicates are used in a path expression to filter the results to contain only nodes that meet specific criteria. Using a predicate, you can, for example, select only the elements that have...
View ArticlePath, Predicates, and XQuery
Positional predicates and reverse axes Oddly, positional predicates have the opposite meaning when using reverse axes such as ancestor, ancestor-or-self, preceding, or preceding-sibling. These axes,...
View ArticleAn Introduction to RELAX NG
RELAX NG is one of several schema languages available for XML. Based on RELAX (REgular LAnguage description for XML) and TREX (Tree Regular Expressions for XML), RELAX NG offers a nice alternative to...
View ArticleProviding Options in RELAX NG
Giving the user choices In the last article, we created a schema requiring a root element named people that represents a list of people, with child elements named person to represent the individual...
View ArticleDatatypes and More in RELAX NG
Datatypes in RELAX NG In the last two articles, if an element did not contain child elements, then it was either empty or it contained plain text. This works fine for some situations. For example,...
View ArticleUsing Schematron
XML schema languages XML schema languages are important because they allow multiple parties to exchange information in a standardized way. Any party, by reading the schema definition, will know what to...
View ArticleSchematron Patterns and Validation
Patterns Rules can also be related to one another. For example, although rules can have different contexts, some can perform the same types of operations on one another. Some rules may deal with the...
View ArticleMore Schematron Features
Namespaces As a modern schema language, Schematron, of course, provides support for namespaces. Consider a document like this: lt;ds:articles xmlns:ds= quot;http://developershed.com quot; gt;...
View ArticleUsing XSL Formatting Objects
Formatting content or data is for many reasons a key process. Content may be wonderful alone, but if the content isn't formatted, then, to most people, it's worth very little because, to them, it's...
View ArticleUsing Regions with XSL Formatting Objects
XSL-FO defines several levels of areas with which we can work. The highest level is the page, and the next level after this is the region. A region is, in the simplest terms, a section of a page. Each...
View ArticleXML Features Added to Two Systems
In the case of Adobe, the company just came out with its Adobe Technical Communication Suite 4 software. This single-source authoring and multi-device publishing toolkit helps technical writers, help...
View ArticleOpen XML Finally Supported by MS Office
Steven Vaughan-Nichols covered the story for ZDNet. The tech war pitted Microsoft's own OpenXML document standard against Adobe's Open Document Format. The latest move by Microsoft will finally allow...
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