Where to Find More Information

More information on XML standards can be found at various Web sites, the most important being the W3C Web site, which is found at http://www.w3.org.

Day 16 covers in more detail the subject of creating and validating XML. It introduces the Java API for XML Processing (JAXP) that allows you to use J2EE to parse and create XML.

Other related XML subjects, such as XSLT, Xpath, and XPointer, are covered on Day 17. A brief introduction to these subjects follows:

• XSL is a stylesheet language for XML. XSL specifies the styling of an XML document by using XSL Transformations to describe how the document is transformed into another XML document.

• XSLT is a language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents. A transformation expressed in XSLT is called a stylesheet.

• XPointer provides a mechanism to “point” to particular information in an XML document.

• XPath is a language for identifying parts of an XML document; it has been designed to be used by both XSLT and XPointer. XPath gets its name from its use of a compact path notation for navigating through the hierarchical structure of an XML document.

With the XPath notation, it is, for example, possible to refer to the third element in the fifth Job node in a XML document.

XPath is also designed so that it can be used for matching (testing whether or not a node matches a pattern). The form of XPath used is XSLT.

Everything in this appendix and a lot more is also covered in some detail in the Sams Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days, Shepherd, ISBN 0-672-32093-2. This book covers everything you need to know about XML to “hit the ground running.”