(XML)Pedagogy

27 Nov 1999


      (XML) means a post about XML (see Gregor Hagedorn's post, "First level
topics on this list (GEN)"; every post should bear a tag among RQT, XML,
GEN).
By the way, this kind of tagging is much in the spirit of XML. Even in
an HTML text, you can mark up a sentence, a paragraph, or words, with
tags like <requirement>, <opinion>, <example>, <reference-to-article>,
etc. To identify this family of tags (called a vocabulary), it is better
(though not mandatory) to indicate that this fragment of HTML text is
using this vocabulary (say, in this example, called
authoring-discussion).
Here is a complete example:
<HTML  xmlns:disc="urn:authoring-discussion" ><!-- N1 -->
     <!-- N2 --><STYLE>
     disc:opinion{color:red; font-size:large;}
     </STYLE>
     <P>
     Everybody agrees that ......; but I think that
     disc:opinionmodelizing amphibians is very
     important and a very special case</disc:opinion>.
     </P>
     </HTML>
You can copy-and-paste this into an example.html file, and see it in
Internet Explorer 5, or Mozilla, or any XHTML+CSS1 compliant browser.
For your conveniance, this file is joined to the post.
Notes:
N1    xmlns is a reserved word meaning "XML namespace"; the string
following = can be:
* a URN, that is an Unique Resource Name, (see RFC 2396, it's only
     required to remain globally unique and persistent ) as in this
     example,
   * or an URL (Uniform Resource Locator), that is something retrievable
     on the Internet, like
     http://www.w3.org/DTD/authoring-discussion.dtd , which in our
     example would contain a formal description of the vocabulary, a DTD
     (XML Data Type Definition) or another syntax like XML Schema.
N2   This is a CSS1 style; complete specification in
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1
There many topics more about XML, like:
* how and why mix several vocabularies,
   * how to format and query an XML document (XSLT),
   * what's going on in the business and scientific domains around XML
   * relations beetwen XML and HTML,
   * XML and the Web: the so-called semantic Web.
If time and popular demand are here, I could write more on this.
Cheers
Jean-Marc

Jean-Marc Vanel

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