XML Course Prerequisites

To complete the required course exercises, you will need a text editor such as Notepad, XMLSPY, or XML Notepad from Microsoft.
How To Use XML Notepad to Create an XML Document
You will also need a browser such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Microsoft Internet Explorer.
One optional exercise requires that you download a parser.
Instructions for downloading this parser can be found at the Setting up software page.

When XML first emerged in 1997 to immediate and massive media attention, reasonable people could disagree as to whether it was for real or just another overhyped acronym. Those disagreements are over: XML is for real. Initially intended as a technology for structured and linked documents, it has embedded itself deeply into the fabric of distributed Internet applications: XML is used to describe data formats, data types, data transformations, data linking, data transfer, and data processing. Although the world of XML is large and growing, its foundations remain unchanged. These foundations are set down in two documents

1. XML 1.0 and
2. XML Namespaces.

Both of which are recommendations issued by W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium. W3C, in case you have not visited their Web site yet, is the organization that is primarily responsible for the infrastructure of the Web, including XML. Its recommendations are de facto standards. All of the W3C recommendations, together with working drafts and other kinds of technical reports, can be found at www.w3c.org/TR.
Although introductory, the following modules will feature examples that you can test and experiment with. These examples will not go beyond the foundations, and I will try to make them readable and self-explanatory. All examples are presented within a framework that makes it possible to experiment with them even before the framework is completely explained.

XML 1.0 and Namespaces in XML provide a tag-based syntax for structuring data and applying markups to documents. Documents that conform to XML 1.0 and Namespaces in XML specifications may be made up of a variety of syntactic constructs such as elements, namespace declarations, attributes, processing instructions, comments, and text. This module provides a description of each of the structural elements in XML along with their syntax.
In the next Lesson, the course material will be discussed.

You will need to decompress the software for this course. For instructions on how to do this, go to the Setup page.

You can download a compressed file that contains:

1. Files to use for each of the scored course exercises
2. Files to use for the optional course exercises