WEB TECHNOLOGIES A COMPUTER SCIENCE PERSPECTIVE

JEFFREY C. JACKSON

Chapter 7 Representing Web Data: XML

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XML
Example XML document:

An XML document is one that follows certain syntax rules (most of which we followed for XHTML)

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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

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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

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

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

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

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 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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JavaScript and XML

Ajax: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML Combination of
(X)HTML XML CSS JavaScript JavaScript DOM (HTML and XML) XMLHttpRequest in ansynchronous 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
Default parser is non-validating and nonnamespace-aware.

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