Unravel the OpenOffice File Format

OpenOffice provides a suite of applications whose native file format consists of a set of XML files, compressed into a ZIP archive. This article explores the basics of the OpenOffice file format.

O'Reilly and Associates (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML>OpenOffice

Update XForms Using XForms

With XForms technology, you can provide a lightweight editor for an existing collection of XForms. Explore an approach to form authoring for simple, quick changes that improve the effectiveness of data collected. Typical form editing requires a separate application even for the most trivial changes. XForms manipulates XML data and submits it to a server, making it an ideal choice to author these trivial changes and submit them for redeployment.

Speicher, Steve K., Jan J. Kratky and Kevin E. Kelly. IBM (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML

Use Character and Entity References

Not all characters are available on the keyboard! This hack shows you how to represent such characters in an XML document by using decimal and hexadecimal character references, and how to represent entities by using entity references.

O'Reilly and Associates (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML

Use Data URIs to Include Media in XML

There are many ways to link to non-XML content within XML, including binary content. Sometimes you need to roll all such external content directly into the XML. Data scheme URIs are one way to specify a full resource within a URI, which you can then use in XML constructs. In this tip, Uche Ogbuji shows how to use this to bundle related media into a single file.

Ogbuji, Uche. IBM (2006). Articles>Information Design>Multimedia>XML

Use Language-Specific Tools for XML Processing

DOM and SAX are the two best known systems for XML processing, but they are really compromises across programming languages. As such, they do not take advantage of any language's particular strengths. Often it is better to duck conventional wisdom and use special APIs that take advantage of particular strengths.

Ogbuji, Uche. IBM (2004). Design>Information Design>XML

Use PHP to create XForms, Part 1: Creating a PHP XForms library

This two-part article series is designed to get PHP developers up to speed in leveraging Web 2.0 XForms forms for their PHP forms development so that they can finally put their outdated Web 1.0 HTML forms away. This will be accomplished by creating a library of functions that generate XForms elements when called upon. In this article, Part 1 of a two-part series, developers will create the XForms library using PHP, allowing each function to take in parameters and output XForm elements.

Anderson, Tyler. IBM (2007). Articles>Information Design>XML>XSL

Use PHP to create XForms, Part 2: Using the PHP XForms Library to Create Useful XForms

This two-part article seriess is designed to get PHP developers up to speed in leveraging Web 2.0 XForms forms for their PHP forms development so that they can finally put their outdated Web 1.0 HTML forms away. In Part 1, you created the PHP XForms library. In this article, Part 2, you will enhance the library to include some error checking and convenience functions to help make using the library more manageable, and lastly you'll demo the library by creating a proof of concept XForm.

Anderson, Tyler. IBM (2007). Articles>Information Design>XML>XSL

Using the SQLXML Data Type

If you're a Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) developer, you'll want to preview the SQLXML technology, currently in development. Check out procedures to create an XML document, store an XML document in a relational database, retrieve an XML document from a database, and navigate an XML document with the SQLXML Java data type.

Vohra, Deepak. IBM (2006). Articles>Information Design>Databases>XML

Using Topic Maps to Extend Relational Databases

Topic Maps provide a very flexible and robust way to add arbitrary data to a relational databases at runtime. Moreover, Topic Maps come with a predefined exchange mechanism (the XML Topic Maps (XTM) interchange syntax) to allow data to be exported to XML.

de Graauw, Marc. XML.com (2003). Articles>Information Design>Databases>XML

Using XML

XML is not just a pretty face, living in isolation from the rest of the computing world. XML is more than a rulebook for generating custom markup languages. It is part of a family of technologies, which, working together, make your XML-based documents very useful indeed.

Eisenberg, J. David. List Apart, A (2002). Design>Information Design>Web Design>XML

Using XML as an Application-Level Protocol

In one of my past articles, A Pattern/Framework for Client/Server Programming in Java, I discussed a pattern for client/server development using java. That article does not answer exactly how the two parties, client and server, communicate with each other. We require an application-level protocol to do the talking between two entities. It sets up rules about how the two applications/entities communicate and understand each other over a network. If you happen to know the TCP/IP networking model or the OSI networking model, you will observe that network-based communication is implemented in layers, with the application layer at the top and the physical layer at the bottom. This article discusses issues you must face when implementing an application-level protocol and how XML proves to be an excellent choice to represent and implement the application-level protocol.

Saleem, Usman. Developer.com (2002). Design>Information Design>Software>XML

Validating a Custom DTD

This article will show you how to create a custom DTD that will add custom attributes, and will also show you how to validate documents that use those new attributes.

Eisenberg, J. David. List Apart, A (2005). Articles>Information Design>Standards>XML

Voice Extensible Markup Language Status  

Introduces readers to Voice Extensible Markup Language (VXML), a markup language that allows vocal interaction between users and applications via a telephone-based communication system. The author also discusses World Wide Web Consortium specifications for VXML.

Lippincott, Richard J. Intercom (2004). Design>Information Design>XML>Voice

What Are RSS Feeds?

RSS, also known as rich site summary or real simply syndication, arrived on the scene a number of years ago, but was only recently embraced by webmasters as a means to effectively syndicate content. RSS Feeds provide webmasters and content providers an avenue to provide concise summaries to prospective readers. Thousands of commercial web sites and blogs now publish content summaries in an RSS feed. Each item in the feed typically contains a headline; article summary and link back to the online article.

Small Business Software (2007). Articles>Information Design>XML>RSS

What Is RDF?

RDF was originally created in 1999 as a standard on top of XML for encoding metadata--literally, data about data. Metadata is, of course, things like who authored a web page, what date a blog entry was published, etc., information that is in some sense secondary to some other content already on the regular web. Since then, and perhaps especially after the updated RDF spec in 2004, the scope of RDF has really evolved into something greater. The most exciting uses of RDF aren't in encoding information about web resources, but information about and relations between things in the real world: people, places, concepts, etc.

Tauberer, Joshua. XML.com (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML>Metadata

What is: XPATH

XPath is a way of pulling out particular data from an XML document. It is used by XSL to determine what should be output in your documents. It is essentially a systematic way of defining an address of each piece of data.

Tech Write Tips (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML>XSL

What the Hell is XML?

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is the Eurodollar of web development. Both XML and the Euro bring order to chaos; both offer undeniable, wide-ranging benefits; both are poised, in 2002, to change the way we do things. Frankly, both scare the crap out of people. For web developers, 2002 is a time to conquer fears and take their first hands-on approach to XML. It's time to examine XML and realize the practical benefits that it can provide to web projects today. The bankers can fend for themselves.

Janisch, Troy. List Apart, A (2002). Design>Web Design>Information Design>XML

The What, Why, How, and Where of DITA  

Is DITA right for your organization? This article provides a starting point for your own research on DITA.

Steiner, Rob. Intercom (2007). Articles>Information Design>XML>DITA

What's the Diff? Diff XML Documents

If you are handling many XML documents, sometimes you need to check the differences between two or more documents. You can perform diffs of XML documents with online and command-line tools.

O'Reilly and Associates (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML>UNIX

When is XML the Wrong Answer?  

XML-based publishing challenges authors to convert from the familiar desktop-publishing routine to new tools. This article explains what you should consider when deciding whether to implement XML.

O'Keefe, Sarah S. Intercom (2007). Articles>Information Design>XML

The Why and How of XML Data Islands

This article explains a useful way to embed data in an HTML document, and store it on the client, using XML. With XML becoming ever more pervasive and the client side implementation gaining a lot of ground, you will probably find yourself using this technique in many projects.

Krishnaswamy, Jayaram. Dev Articles (2006). Design>Web Design>Information Design>XML

Why You Should Include an XML Declaration

Although XML declarations are optional, every XML document should have one. An XML declaration helps both human users and automated software identify the document as XML. It identifies the version of XML in use, specifies the character encoding, and can even help optimize the parsing. Most importantly, it's a crucial clue that what you're reading is in fact an XML document in environments where file type information is unavailable or unreliable.

Harold, Elliotte Rusty. InformIT (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML

The Wisdom of Crowds Meets the Wisdom of Authors: How XML Enables the Semantic Web

Combining semantic markup with a granular authoring approach like DITA holds a lot of promise for content creators and consumers alike. Content becomes easy to define and even easier to discover. The combination also holds a lot of promise for the future of the Semantic Web itself. In fact, creating the Semantic Web might be as easy as authoring content in DITA.

Wlodarczyk, Paul. XML.org (2008). Articles>Information Design>Web Design>XML

The World of RSS Explorations

I’ve now seen firsthand that RSS feedreaders, or news aggregators, truly can provide the ability to literally scan hundreds of site updates and headlines in a matter of seconds, letting me know when those sites have updated posts or news. Depending on the software used, the user can be notified by a bubble popping up, a sound, or the headlines appearing in a list with a right click mouseover on the aggregator’s system tray icon, for example.

Kaiser, Shirley E. Brainstorms and Raves (2003). Articles>Information Design>XML>RSS

X-Diff: An Effective Change Detection Algorithm for XML Documents    

XML has become the de facto standard format for web publishing and data transportation. Since online information changes frequently, being able to quickly detect changes in XML documents is important to Internet query systems, search engines, and continuous query systems. Previous work in change detection on XML, or other hierarchically structured documents, used an ordered tree model, in which left-to-right order among siblings is important and it can affect the change result. This paper argues that an unordered model (only ancestor relationships are significant) is more suitable for most database applications. Using an unordered model, change detection is substantially harder than using the ordered model, but the change result that it generates is more accurate. This paper proposes X-Diff, an effective algorithm that integrates key XML structure characteristics with standard tree-to-tree correction techniques. The algorithm is analyzed and compared with XyDiff [CAM02], a published XML diff algorithm. An experimental evaluation on both algorithms is provided.

Wang, Yuan, David J. DeWitt and Jin-Yi Cai. University of Wisconsin (2001). Articles>Information Design>Programming>XML