How This Book Is Organized

This book is divided into seven chapters, each of which is briefly described here:

Chapter 1, Looking at XML Documents

Contains a series of introductory hacks, including an overview of what an XML document should look like, how to display an XML document in a browser, how to style an XML document with CSS, and how to use command-line Java applications to process XML.

Chapter 2, Creating XML Documents

Teaches you how to edit XML with a variety of editors, including Vim, Emacs, <oXygen/>, and Microsoft Office 2003 applications. Among other things, shows you how to convert a plain text file to XML with xmlspy, translate CSV to XML, and convert HTML to XHTML with HTML Tidy.

Chapter 3, Transforming XML Documents

Explores many ways that you can use XSLT and other tools to transform XML into CSV, transform an iTunes library (plist) file into HTML, transform XML documents with grep and sed, and generate SVG with XSLT.

Chapter 4, XML Vocabularies

Helps you get acquainted with namespaces and RDDL, and describes how to use common XML vocabularies and frameworks such as XHTML, DocBook, RDDL, and RDF in the form of FOAF.

Chapter 5, Defining XML Vocabularies with Schema Languages

Covers the creation of valid XML using DTDs, XML Schema, RELAX NG, and Schematron. It also explains how to generate schemas from instances, how to generate instances from schemas, and how to convert a schema from one schema language to another.

Chapter 6, RSS and Atom

Teaches you how to subscribe to RSS feeds with news readers; create RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom documents; and generate RSS from Google queries and with Movable Type templates.

Chapter 7, Advanced XML Hacks

Shows you how to perform XML tasks in an Ant pipeline, how to use Cocoon, and how to process XML documents using DOM, SAX, Genx, and the facilities of C#'s System.Xml namespace, among others.