In this week's column, I'd like to indulge in some gentle fun at the expense of pundits and pronouncers. While XML is as rich a field as any for crackpots and timewasters, we must be careful not to pour cold water on experimentation and innovation. The topics of XML-oriented programming languages and the Semantic Web have been targets of mockery in their time, so this week I'm asking whether the true believers might be right.

A recent article on the O'Reilly Network showed how to edit XML using Word 2003, as long as your target XML format was not too far-removed from the built-in structural limitations of a word processor, and last year there was a survey of solutions on XML.com. But since Word 2000d, it has been possible to "export as XML" if you are up for a little bit of post-processing.

The XML binding gnosis.xml.objectify was designed, in many ways, more as a toolkit than as a final tool. But this leaves some (potential) users confused about how to specialize it for some common tasks. In this article, David shows readers how very thin wrappers can customize gnosis.xml.objectify to perform actions such as: Provide XPath access to child objects; automatically reserialize objects to XML; modify the syntax of access to nodes. Some of these techniques involve rather trivial specialization of provided parent classes. Others involve small utility functions.

Though Web services have been much ballyhooed for their ability to reduce the amount of manual coding for programmers, glaring inefficiencies in the way XML (define) is digested threatens to paralyze distributed computing.

In the past, there were only two ways to parse an XML file—SAX (Simple API for XML) and DOM (Document Object Model). The first reads an XML file in a sequential manner and signals the application as it finds different XML components like elements and attributes, while the second creates a tree representation of the data in the XML document, and then offers various methods to navigate through this data.

A growing number of devs are finding benefits in learning hands-on XML skills. For example, devs at Quadrix Solutions have found that the more devs know about XML, they have in their hands the best "applications glue" they've ever worked with. Take a look a the 5 ways Quadrix engineers use to tap into the power of XML for integration.

This week I'm attending XML 2004 Conference and Exhibition, organized by IDEAlliance, at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC. Titled "XML: From Syntax to Solutions," North America's premiere XML conference is moving in the same direction as XML.com and XTech 2005. A broad industry consensus has formed around the idea that the era of core XML specification-making is over, but that a great deal of work remains to be done.

You don't have to wait for Longhorn to explore the benefits of Avalon, the runtime engine that underpins its presentation tier. Xamlon, the most mature third-party implementation of Avalon, lets you build XAML-based applications right now.

Since the inception of XML, many developers have wondered why we need XML...

Meet Schematron, a schema language that allows you to directly express rules without creating a whole grammatical infrastructure. Schematron is useful whenever you wish to apply and check against rules for the contents of XML documents. Schematron is extraordinarily flexible in the variety of rules you can express, and it's even more expressive than other schema languages such as DTD, W3C XML Schema (WXS) and RELAX NG. In this tutorial, author Uche Ogbuji uses detailed examples to illustrate Schematron's use, and offers recipes for common schema needs.

This online training tutorial series provides an introduction to the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and its general format. It introduces the fundamentals of XML, including how to read a basic XML document, the XML document structure, and viewing XML source documents. It shows how to build an XML data document, including creating elements and element modes, naming XML objects, and creating declarations and well-formed documents. Building DTDs is explained in detail, along with creating and managing internal, external, and parameter entities. Additional topics covered in this series include a detailed discussion of the Document Object Model, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and XSL Style Language.

This tutorial gives you the building blocks you need to set up and work with the XML Schema Infoset Model. It shows how to set up the development environment, create and load XML Schema models, work with namespaces, and reuse definitions across XML Schema models. This tutorial is the first of a two-part series that introduces you to XML Schema concepts and the XML Schema Infoset model.

The new master/detail feature allows you to bind to the current record of a hierarchical record set. This means that you can now bind the child elements of the current record to a distinct table. For example, consider the following XML.

Microsoft® Internet Explorer 5.0 and later is released with a C++ Data Source Object (DSO) that can be used to bind XML to HTML. Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 were released with a Java XML DSO that is still supported in Internet Explorer 5.0 and later; however, the new C++ DSO gives you better performance and the ability to bind directly to an XML data island.

A typed XML value is an XML element value that has been assigned a data type in an XML Schema, a formal definition of an XML document. The XML parser uses the schema to validate the document. The XML Schema information resides either in a schema file or within the XML document itself.

A data type within an XML document is a type that has been assigned to an element on the instance using the dt:dt attribute, or through an XML Schema, a formal definition of an XML document. In addition, data types can be declared as elements. The XML parser uses the data type information to validate the document.

An XML namespace is a collection of names that can be used as element or attribute names in an XML document. The namespace qualifies element names uniquely on the Web in order to avoid conflicts between elements with the same name. The namespace is identified by some Uniform ResourceIdentifier (URI), either a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), or a Uniform Resource Number (URN), but it doesn't matter what, if anything, it points to. URIs are used simply because they are globally unique across the Internet.

The XML object model is a collection of objects that you use to access and manipulate the data stored in an XML document. The XML document is modeled after a tree, in which each element in the tree is considered a node. Objects with various properties and methods represent the tree and its nodes. Each node contains the actual data in the document.

A data island is an XML document that exists within an HTML page. It allows you to script against the XML document without having to load it through script or through the

A basic XML document is simplyan XML element that can, but might not, include nested XML elements.