CSI 3140

WWW Structures, Techniques and Standards

Representing Web Data:

XML

XML
Example XML document:

An XML document is one that follows

certain syntax rules (most of which we
followed for XHTML)

Guy-Vincent Jourdan :: CSI 3140 :: based on Jeffrey C. Jacksons slides

XML Syntax
An XML document consists of

Markup
Tags, which begin with < and end with >
References, which begin with & and end with ;

Character, e.g. &#x20;

Entity, e.g. &lt;

The entities lt, gt, amp, apos, and quot are recognized in
every XML document.
Other XHTML entities, such as nbsp, are only recognized in
other XML documents if they are defined in the DTD

Character data: everything not markup

Guy-Vincent Jourdan :: CSI 3140 :: based on Jeffrey C. Jacksons slides

XML Syntax
Comments

Begin with <!-End -->

Must not contain

CDATA section

Special element the entire content of which is interpreted

as character data, even if it appears to be markup
Begins with <![CDATA[
Ends with ]]> (illegal except when ending CDATA)
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XML Syntax
The CDATA section

is equivalent to the markup

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XML Syntax
< and & must be represented by references
except

When beginning markup

Within comments
Within CDATA sections

Guy-Vincent Jourdan :: CSI 3140 :: based on Jeffrey C. Jacksons slides

XML Syntax
Element tags and elements

Three types

Start, e.g. <message>

End, e.g. </message>
Empty element, e.g. <br />

Start and end tags must properly nest

Corresponding pair of start and end element tags plus
everything in between them defines an element
Character data may only appear within an element

Guy-Vincent Jourdan :: CSI 3140 :: based on Jeffrey C. Jacksons slides

XML Syntax
Start and empty-element tags may contain
attribute specifications separated by white
space

Syntax: name = quoted value

quoted value must not contain <, can contain &
only if used as start of reference
quoted value must begin and end with matching
quote characters ( or )
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XML Syntax
Element and attribute names are case
sensitive
XML white space characters are space,
carriage return, line feed, and tab

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XML Documents
A well-formed XML document

follows the XML syntax rules and

has a single root element

Well-formed documents have a tree structure

Many XML parsers (software for
reading/writing XML documents) use tree
representation internally
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XML Documents
An XML document is written according to
an XML vocabulary that defines

Recognized element and attribute names

Allowable element content
Semantics of elements and attributes

XHTML is one widely-used XML

vocabulary
Another example: RSS (rich site summary)
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XML Documents

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XML Documents

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XML Documents
Valid names and content for an XML
vocabulary can be specified using

Natural language
XML DTDs (Chapter 2)
XML Schema (Chapter 9)

If DTD is used, then XML document can

include a document type declaration:

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XML Documents
Two types of XML parsers:

Validating
Requires document type declaration
Generates error if document does not

Conform with DTD and

Meet XML validity constraints

Example: every attribute value of type ID must be unique within

the document

Non-validating
Checks for well-formedness
Can ignore external DTD

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XML Documents
Good practice to begin XML documents with
an XML declaration

Minimal example:
If included, < must be very first character of the
document
To override default UTF-8/UTF-16 character
encoding, include encoding declaration
following version:
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XML Documents
Internal subset of DTD
Declaration of
internal subset of DTD

Entity vsn will be defined by any XML parser,

validating or not
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XML Namespaces
XML Namespace: Collection of element and
attribute names associated with an XML vocabulary
Namespace Name: Absolute URI that is the name
of the namespace

Ex: http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml is the namespace

name of XHTML 1.0

Default namespace for elements of a document is

specified using a form of the xmlns attribute:

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XML Namespaces
Another form of xmlns attribute known as a
namespace declaration can be used to
associate a namespace prefix with a
namespace name:
Namespace prefix

Namespace declaration

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XML Namespaces
Example use of namespace prefix:

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XML Namespaces
In a namespace-aware XML application, all
element and attribute names are considered qualified
names

A qualified name has an associated expanded name that

consists of a namespace name and a local name
Ex: item is a qualified name with expanded name
<null, item>
Ex: xhtml:a is a qualified name with expanded name
<http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml, a>

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XML Namespaces
Other namespace usage:
A namespace can be declared and used on the same element

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XML Namespaces
Other namespace usage:

A namespace prefix can be redefined for

an element and its content
These elements belong to http://www.example.org/namespace

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JavaScript and XML

JavaScript DOM can be used to process
XML documents
JavaScript XML Dom processing is often
used with XMLHttpRequest

Host object that is a constructor for other host

objects
Sends an HTTP request to server, receives back
an XML document
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JavaScript and XML

Example use:

Previous visit count servlet: must reload

document to see updated count
Visit count with XMLHttpRequest: browser
will automatically update the visit count
periodically without reloading the entire page

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Document
generated by
GET request to
VisitCountUpdate
servlet

JavaScript and XML

JavaScript file using
XMLHttpRequest object

span that will be updated by JavaScript code

26
Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0

JavaScript and XML

XMLHttpRequest
request is processed
by doPost() method of
servlet

Response is XML document

Current visit count is returned as content

of count XML element
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Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0

JavaScript and XML

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JavaScript and XML

Typical code for creating an instance of XMLHttpRequest

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JavaScript and XML

Return immediately after sending request

(asynchronous behavior)

Function called as
state of connection
changes

Body of request (empty in this example)

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JavaScript and XML

Indicates response received

successfully

Root of
returned
XML
document

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JavaScript and XML

Ajax: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML
Combination of

(X)HTML
XML
CSS
JavaScript
JavaScript DOM (HTML and XML)
XMLHttpRequest in asynchronous mode
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Java-based DOM
Java DOM API defined by org.w3c.dom
package
Semantically similar to JavaScript DOM
API, but many small syntactic differences

Nodes of DOM tree belong to classes such as

Node, Document, Element, Text
Non-method properties accessed via methods

Ex: parentNode accessed by calling

getParentNode()
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Java-based DOM
Methods such as
getElementsByTagName() return
instance of NodeList

getLength() method returns # of items

item() method returns an item

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Java-based DOM
Example: program to count link elements
in an RSS document:

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Java-based DOM
Imports:
From Java
API for XML
Processing
(JAXP)

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Java-based DOM
Default parser is non-validating and nonnamespace-aware.
Overriding:

Also setValidating(true)
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Java-based DOM
Namespace-aware versions of methods end
in NS:
Namespace name

Local name

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SAX

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SAX

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SAX

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SAX

Used if not namespace-aware or

if qualified name does not belong
to any namespace.

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SAX

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Transformations
JAXP provides API for transforming
between DOM, SAX, and Stream (text)
representations of XML documents
Example:

Input from stream to DOM

Modify DOM
Output as stream

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Transformations

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Transformations

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Transformations
SAX output means that a SAX event
handler is called:

Example: the code

feeds the XML document represented by DOM

document through the SAX event handler
CountElementsHelper()

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XSL
The Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL)
is an XML vocabulary typically used to
transform XML documents from one form to
another form
XSL document

Input XML
document

XSLT Processor

Output XML
document

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XSL

XSL
markup

Example XSL document

HelloWorld.xsl

Everything in the body

of the document that is
not XSL markup is
template data

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XSL
Input XML document HelloWorld.xml:

Output XML document:

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XSL

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XSL
Components of XSL:

XSL Transformations (XSLT): defines XSL

namespace elements and attributes
XML Path Language (XPath): used in many
XSL attribute values (ex: child::message)
XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO): XML
vocabulary for defining document style (printoriented)

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XPath
XPath operates on a tree representation of an
XML document

Similar to DOM tree in that nodes have different

types (element, text, comment, etc.)
Unlike DOM, attributes are also nodes in the
XPath tree
Root of XPath tree called document root
One of the children of the document root, called
the document element, is the root element of the
XML document
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XPath
Location path: expression representing one
or more XPath tree nodes

/ represents document root

child::message is an example of a location
step and has two parts:
Axis name

Node test

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XPath
XSLT specifies
context node

Attribute nodes are

only seen along the attribute axis
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XPath
Node test:

Name test: qualified name representing an

element (or attribute, for attribute axis) type
Example: child::message uses a name test
May use * as wildcard name test

Node-type test:
text(): true if node is a text node
comment(): true if node is a comment node
node(): true of any node

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XPath
A location step can have one or more
predicates that act as filters:

This predicate
applied first

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XPath

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XPath
Abbreviations:

Axis defaults to child if not specified

@ can be used in place of attribute::

child::para = para
attribute::display = @display

parent::node() = ..
self::node() = .

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XPath
A location path is one or more location steps
separated by /

Ex: child::para/child::strong (or

just para/strong)
Ex: para/strong/emph

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XPath
Evaluating a two-step location path:

Evaluate first location step, producing node list

L1
For each node ni in L1
Temporarily set context node to ni
Evaluate second location step, producing node list Li

Result is union of Lis

Continue process for paths with more steps

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XPath

If body is context node, then:

para/strong represents {s1,s2,s4}

para[strong] represents {p1, p3}
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XPath
An absolute location path begins with / and uses
the document root as the context node

Ex: /body/para represents all para nodes that are

children of body which is child of document root
Ex: / represents list consisting only of the document
root

A relative location path does not begin with / and

uses an element determined by the application (e.g.,
XSLT) as the context node

Ex: body/para
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XPath
Another abbreviation:

/descendant-or-self::node()/ = //
Examples:
//strong: All strong elements in document
.//strong: All strong elements that are
descendants (or self) relative to the context node

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XPath
Combining node lists:

Use | to represent union of node lists produced

by individual location paths
Ex: strong|descendant::emph
represents all nodes that are either
children of the context node of type strong; or
descendants of the context node of type emph

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XSLT

Pattern of template rule

Template
of template
rule

Template
rule

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XSLT
XSLT processor deals with three XPath
trees:

Input trees: source and style-sheet

Elements containing only white space are normally
not included in either input tree (exception:
xsl:text element)
White space retained within other elements

Output tree: result

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XSLT
XSLT processing (high level):

Construct input trees

Initialize empty result tree
Search source tree for a node that is matched by a
template rule, i.e., a node that is contained in the node list
represented by the pattern of some template rule
Instantiate the template of the matching template rule in
the result tree

Context node for XPath expressions is matched node

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XSLT

Matches source tree document root

Context node for relative location

path is source tree document root

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XSLT

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XSLT
Restrictions on XPath in template rule
pattern (value of match attribute):

Only child and attribute axes are allowed

directly (can indirectly use descendant-orself axis via // notation)
XPath expression must evaluate to a node list
(some XPath expressions are functions that
produce string values)

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XSLT

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XSLT

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XSLT

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XSLT

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XSLT
Adding attributes:

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XSLT
Source document elements are in a namespace

We want to copy
all h1 elements
plus all of their
descendants

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XSLT

XPath expressions must

use qualified names (because source
includes namespace)

Copy
element
and content
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XSLT
Template markup
in the result tree becomes

Most browsers will not accept this notation!

XSLT does not recognize &nbsp;

Solution:

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XSLT
Adding XML special characters to the result

Template:
Becomes & on input

Result:

disable-output-escaping also
applies to value-of
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XSLT
Output formatting:

Add xml:space=preserve to
transform element of template to retain white
space
Use xsl:output element:

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XML and Browsers

An XML document can contain a processing
instruction telling a browser to:

Apply XSLT to create an XHTML document:

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XML and Browsers

An XML document can contain a processing
instruction telling a browser to:

Apply CSS to style the XML document:

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