XML technologies for storing and exchanging data

• HTML and XML

  Exercises:
  1. Add this ravioli recipe to the recipe collection XML file. Make sure the result is wellformed XML.

  2. Use the W3C validator to check whether www.jp.dk and www.microsoft.com (or some other Web pages) are valid HTML. If not, see what kinds of errors there are.

  3. Design an XML language to represent driving directions. There are countless different solutions, but try to make a fine-grained model.

  Tips:

  • Use your favorite text editor (e.g. Notepad) for editing XML documents. Place your files in C:\XML\ (where the relevant Java jar/class files are also located.)

  • To check that a document is wellformed XML, you can either
    • try viewing the page in Explorer or Mozilla, or
    • use the dom.Writer example application of the Xerces tool:
       cd \XML
       java -classpath xercesImpl.jar;xercesSamples.jar;xmlParserAPIs.jar dom.Writer file.xml > out.xml

  • To run the W3C validator on a page without a DOCTYPE and encoding, try using "HTML 4.01 Transitional" and "iso-8859-1".

• XPath and XSLT

  Exercises:
  4. Run the recipe examples through the XPath Visualizer (or use the ApplyXPath program described below).

  5. Explain the result of the following XPath expression on recipes:

     //ingredient/ingredient/ingredient/ancestor::recipe[number(.//nutrition/@calories)>number(5000)]/title

  6. Write an XPath expression that for each recipe that also uses milk, finds the number of eggs being used (the result is a list of numbers).

  7. Write an XPath expression that finds the total number of eggs being used in all recipes (the result is a single number).

  8. Use the XPath Visualizer on your own XML version of the driving directions. Try out as many axes as possible.

  9. Create a different stylesheet for the recipes. Change the XHTML markup to obtain a different look.

  10. Create a new stylesheet for the recipes that only shows the title of each recipe.

  11. Continuing the previous exercise: Make the list of titles sorted alphabetically.

  12. Create a stylesheet (producing XHTML) for your own XML version of the driving directions.

  Tips:

  • You can use the program ApplyXPath to evaluate XPath expressions:
      java -classpath xalan.jar;. ApplyXPath
    

  • To perform XSLT transformations, use Explorer or Mozilla (as described here), or use the Xalan command-line tool:
      java -classpath xalan.jar;xercesImpl.jar;xml-apis.jar org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -IN input.xml -XSL stylesheet.xsl -OUT output.xml

• DTD and XML Schema