Tour de XML

Introduction

The purpose of this page is to index a variety of XML things for short demos. I use this page to motivate students for learning XML in classes I teach, e.g. COAP 2180 and STIC II. I usually just show a picture or two and then do a live demo.

Text-centric formats (often hand-coded)

Semantically structured documents

• DocBook, the most popular structured document format for writing books and manuals
• DITA, a new modular extensible document architecture, popular with IBM.

Web contents

• XHTML, popular web page format (to be replaced by XHTML5 in the future).

Data-centric formats (sometimes hand-coded)

Multimedia synchronization

• Timed Text is a W3C standard that is not hugely popular. In Flash, it is used for captions, visit the Flash video captions tutorial. It also is rumored to work in IE 10.

News syndication

• RSS and News feed aggregators

Vector graphics

• SVG (*.svg), popular web format, part of HTML5. Visit openclipart.org. SVG works in all browsers except IE 7/8.
• X3D, unpopular 3D web format, new version of oldest Internet format (VRML). Visit Interactive Demos from BS Contact (an X3D vendor)
• Collada (*.dae), a 3D exchange format. Also used in Google Earth (via the Keyhole Markup language) and therefore fairly popular.

Data-centric formats

Business

• BPMN for modeling and implementing business processes. See BPMN 1.2 tutorial
• BPEL a standard for describing executable business process models (partly replaced by BPMN 2.0).

Authoring formats

Typically, authoring formats define the structure of a zip file, where a single XML file organizes the rest. Most contents are also encoded in XML.

• EPub, most popular e-book format (or maybe second most, since Amazon uses a proprietary format for the Kindle)
• Open Packaging Conventions and Office Open XML (e.g.. Microsoft Word *.docx)
• OpenDocument (ODF) (e.g. OpenOffice *.odt)
• Flash CS6 *.fla files
• IMS Content Packaging, used to package various types of e-learning formats

Rename that type of file to *.zip to open and have fun with ...

Playlists

• Advanced Stream Redirector (ASX) is an XML format used to store Windows Media files Microsoft Windows Media Player
• Windows Media Player Playlist (WPL) is a newer version that is based on a SMIL structure.
• Compare this to a non-XML alternative like M3U (Winamp)

XML for development

GUI generators

• MXML is Adobe's Layout language for Adobe Flex applications. For the demo see: Adobe Flex 3 Component Explorer
• XML User Interface Language (aka XUL) is the language used to make the Firefox GUI and other applications.

Programming languages and accessories made in XML

• XSLT is a translation language, see XSLT Tutorial - Basics
• XQuery is a query language, see XQuery tutorial - basics,
• Many special purpose languages like XPath, Xinclude and Xlink are used by other XML languages. See XPath tutorial - basics and XInclude

More

• Browse the XML category.