Tour de XML

Draft

Introduction

The purpose of this page is to index a variety of XML things for short demos. I.e. I will 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.

We'll have a first version by december 2010 - 18:45, 31 October 2010 (CET).

The list

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.

Business

• PBMN 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).

Wordprocessing formats

• Open Packaging Conventions and Office Open XML (i.e. *.docx)

Multimedia (internal) source formats

• Flash CS6 *.fla files

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.

Structured documents

• ePUB, most popular e-book format (or maybe second most, since Amazon uses a proprietary format for the Kindle)
• DocBook, the most popular structured document format for writing books and manuals
• XHTML, popular web page format (to be replaced by XHTML5 in the future).

News syndication

• RSS and News feed aggregators

GUI generators

• MXML is Adobe's Layout language for Adobe Flex applications. For the demo see: Adobe Flex 3 Component Explorer

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 Programming

• XSLT Tutorial - Basics, XPath tutorial - basics, XQuery tutorial - basics, XInclude, ...