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XML Bible ™

Elliotte Rusty Harold

IDG Books Worldwide, Inc.

An International Data Group Company
Foster City, CA ✦ Chicago, IL ✦ Indianapolis, IN ✦ New York, NY
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XML™ Bible For general information on IDG Books Worldwide’s

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Welcome to the world of IDG Books Worldwide.

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Credits
Acquisitions Editor Copy Editors
John Osborn Amy Eoff
Amanda Kaufman
Development Editor Nicole LeClerc
Terri Varveris Victoria Lee

Contributing Writer Production

Heather Williamson IDG Books Worldwide Production

Technical Editor Proofreading and Indexing

Greg Guntle York Production Services

About the Author

Elliotte Rusty Harold is an internationally respected writer, programmer, and
educator both on the Internet and off. He got his start by writing FAQ lists for the
Macintosh newsgroups on Usenet, and has since branched out into books, Web
sites, and newsletters. He lectures about Java and object-oriented programming
at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. His Cafe con Leche Web site at http://
metalab.unc.edu/xml/ has become one of the most popular independent XML
sites on the Internet.

Elliotte is originally from New Orleans where he returns periodically in search of

a decent bowl of gumbo. However, he currently resides in the Prospect Heights
neighborhood of Brooklyn with his wife Beth and cats Charm (named after the
quark) and Marjorie (named after his mother-in-law). When not writing books, he
enjoys working on genealogy, mathematics, and quantum mechanics. His previous
books include The Java Developer’s Resource, Java Network Programming, Java
Secrets, JavaBeans, XML: Extensible Markup Language, and Java I/O.
3236-7 FM.F.qc 6/30/99 2:59 PM Page vii

For Ma, a great grandmother

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Preface
Welcome to the XML Bible. After reading this book I hope you’ll agree with me that
XML is the most exciting development on the Internet since Java, and that it makes
Web site development easier, more productive, and more fun.

This book is your introduction to the exciting and fast growing world of XML. In this
book, you’ll learn how to write documents in XML and how to use style sheets to
convert those documents into HTML so legacy browsers can read them. You’ll
also learn how to use document type definitions (DTDs) to describe and validate
documents. This will become increasingly important as more and more browsers like
Mozilla and Internet Explorer 5.0 provide native support for XML.

About You the Reader

Unlike most other XML books on the market, the XML Bible covers XML not from
the perspective of a software developer, but rather that of a Web-page author. I
don’t spend a lot of time discussing BNF grammars or parsing element trees.
Instead, I show you how you can use XML and existing tools today to more
efficiently produce attractive, exciting, easy-to-use, easy-to-maintain Web sites
that keep your readers coming back for more.

This book is aimed directly at Web-site developers. I assume you want to use XML
to produce Web sites that are difficult to impossible to create with raw HTML. You’ll
be amazed to discover that in conjunction with style sheets and a few free tools,
XML enables you to do things that previously required either custom software
costing hundreds to thousands of dollars per developer, or extensive knowledge
of programming languages like Perl. None of the software in this book will cost
you more than a few minutes of download time. None of the tricks require any
programming.

What You Need to Know

XML does build on HTML and the underlying infrastructure of the Internet. To that
end, I will assume you know how to use ftp files, send email, and load URLs in your
Web browser of choice. I will also assume you have a reasonable knowledge of
HTML at about the level supported by Netscape 1.1. On the other hand, when I
discuss newer aspects of HTML that are not yet in widespread use like cascading
style sheets, I will cover them in depth.
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x Preface

To be more specific, in this book I assume that you can:

✦ Write a basic HTML page including links, images, and text using a text editor.
✦ Place that page on a Web server.

On the other hand, I do not assume that you:

✦ Know SGML. In fact, this preface is almost the only place in the entire book
you’ll see the word SGML used. XML is supposed to be simpler and more
widespread than SGML. It can’t be that if you have to learn SGML first.
✦ Are a programmer, whether of Java, Perl, C, or some other language, XML is
a markup language, not a programming language. You don’t need to be a
programmer to write XML documents.

What You’ll Learn

This book has one primary goal; to teach you to write XML documents for the Web.
Fortunately, XML has a decidedly flat learning curve, much like HTML (and unlike
SGML). As you learn a little you can do a little. As you learn a little more, you can do
a little more. Thus the chapters in this book build steadily on each other. They are
meant to be read in sequence. Along the way you’ll learn:

✦ How an XML document is created and delivered to readers.

✦ How semantic tagging makes XML documents easier to maintain and develop
than their HTML equivalents.
✦ How to post XML documents on Web servers in a form everyone can read.
✦ How to make sure your XML is well-formed.
✦ How to use international characters like _ and _ in your documents.
✦ How to validate documents with DTDs.
✦ How to use entities to build large documents from smaller parts.
✦ How attributes describe data.
✦ How to work with non-XML data.
✦ How to format your documents with CSS and XSL style sheets.
✦ How to connect documents with XLinks and Xpointers.
✦ How to merge different XML vocabularies with namespaces.
✦ How to write metadata for Web pages using RDF.
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Preface xi

In the final section of this book, you’ll see several practical examples of XML being
used for real-world applications including:

✦ Web Site Design

✦ Push
✦ Vector Graphics
✦ Genealogy

How the Book Is Organized

This book is divided into five parts and includes three appendixes:

I. Introducing XML
II. Document Type Definitions
III. Style Languages
IV. Supplemental Technologies
V. XML Applications

By the time you’re finished reading this book, you’ll be ready to use XML to create
compelling Web pages. The five parts and the appendixes are described below.

Part I: Introducing XML

Part I consists of Chapters 1 through 7. It begins with the history and theory behind
XML, the goals XML is trying to achieve, and shows you how the different pieces of
the XML equation fit together to create and deliver documents to readers. You’ll see
several compelling examples of XML applications to give you some idea of the wide
applicability of XML, including the Vector Markup Language (VML), the Resource
Description Framework (RDF), the Mathematical Markup Language (MathML), the
Extensible Forms Description Language (XFDL), and many others. Then you’ll learn
by example how to write XML documents with tags you define that make sense for
your document. You’ll see how to edit them in a text editor, attach style sheets to
them, and load them into a Web browser like Internet Explorer 5.0 or Mozilla. You’ll
even learn how you can write XML documents in languages other than English,
even languages that aren’t written remotely like English, such as Chinese, Hebrew,
and Russian.
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xii Preface

Part II: Document Type Definitions

Part II consists of Chapters 8 through 11, all of which focus on document type
definitions (DTDs). An XML document may optionally contain a DTD that specifies
which elements are and are not allowed in an XML document. The DTD specifies
the exact context and structure of those elements. A validating parser can read a
document and compare it to its DTD, and report any mistakes it finds. This enables
document authors to make sure that their work meets any necessary criteria.

In Part II, you’ll learn how to attach a DTD to a document, how to validate your
documents against their DTDs, and how to write your own DTDs that solve your
own problems. You’l learn the syntax for declaring elements, attributes, entities,
and notations. You’ll see how you can use entity declarations and entity references
to build both a document and its DTD from multiple, independent pieces. This
allows you to make long, hard-to-follow documents much simpler by separating
them into related modules and components. And you’ll learn how to integrate other
forms of data like raw text and GIF image files in your XML document.

Part III: Style Languages

Part III consists of Chapters 12 through 15. XML markup only specifies what’s in a
document. Unlike HTML, it does not say anything about what that content should
look like. Information about an XML document’s appearance when printed, viewed
in a Web browser, or otherwise displayed is stored in a style sheet. Different style
sheets can be used for the same document. You might, for instance, want to use a
style sheet that specifies small fonts for printing, another one that uses larger fonts
for on-screen use, and a third with absolutely humongous fonts to project the
document on a wall at a seminar. You can change the appearance of an XML docu-
ment by choosing a different style sheet without touching the document itself.

Part III describes in detail the two style sheet languanges in broadest use on the
Web, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and the Extensible Style Language (XSL).

CSS is a simple style-sheet language originally designed for use with HTML. CSS
exists in two versions: CSS Level 1 and CSS Level 2. CSS Level 1 provides basic
information about fonts, color, positioning, and text properties, and is reasonably
well supported by current Web browsers for HTML and XML. CSS Level 2 is a more
recent standard that adds support for aural style sheets, user interface styles,
international and bi-directional text, and more. CSS is a relatively simple standard
that spplies fixed style rules to the contents of particular elements.

XSL, by contrast, is a more complicated and more powerful style language that cannot
only apply styles to the contents of elements but can also rearrange elements, add
boilerplate text, and transform documents in almost arbitrary ways. XSL is divided
into two parts: a transformation language for converting XML trees to alternative
trees, and a formatting language for specifying the appearance of the elements of an
XML tree. Currently, the transformation language is better supported by most tools