I have created xml, xmlschema and xsl files. Is there any way out to view this xml file in other than IE 5.0. As far as my knowledge goes, schema is a tool for validation, not for presentation. Even more, becaue of perfomance reason you shoul not use DTD/schema during the presentation, unless you want to make use of default values. If I am wrong, please, correct me.
And what parser does, is it converts xml to html, can anybody explain me. Two XML gurus on �parser definition� :
Frank Carver:
�I find that the simplest way to think of a parser is as a data-loader. It reads an external representation of an XML document and transforms it into some sort of in-memory representation.�
Ajith Kallambella: �A parser is a piece of software that "walks through" your XML. All parsers check for well-formedness. Some of them even checks structural integrity. Most importantly a parser will allow you to plug in programming logic so that you can look at the XML data and do some useful stuff. Currently there are XML parsers available in many popular langaguages - C++,
Java, Perl etc. You will need a parser if you intend to do XML processing, not just rendering the XML content in a fancy format.�
If all you want is to SHOW your XML, you need an XSLT engine (
Xalan, for example), which will convert your XML into some specified format (most typically HTML).
If you want always show the same XML data, in other words, perform presentation statically, you can convert XML into HTML once by caling
Xalan from command line on your local computer and then publish resulting HTML. If you need dynamical publishing, for example, you need to show only a part of XML data, or show them sorted in user-specified order, than you need Xalan run-time call from your HTML page. It is more complicated task, you can use
JSP, particularly, use already defined JSP tags.
XSL taglib has �apply� tag for this purpose.
What is the best book for XML There is no such thing as �the best book for XML�, because evaluation depends on too many factors:
1) what you are up to
with XML
2) what is your IT background: begenners and experienced IT professionals may find different books particularly useful, although most of books seems are written to incorporate all range of expertise;
3) on what part of XML learning curve you currently are;
4) what is your thinking style;
5) ...
For genuine beginnners �Visual� series may be a good choice. But I am not a true beginner, hope you already figured out that I am damn sophisticated developer
so my advice maybe be all wrong.
Since you asked about schema and parsers, I assume that you are not a beginner. Then any books which give a good overview will be useful
XML bible,
Beginning XML,
Professional XML...