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Understanding XML: Concepts and Applications (Instructor: Cyri Jones)

Hype and hope surround the new eXtensible Markup Language (XML) standard and its component technologies, the eXtensible Style Language (XSL) and the Document Object Model (DOM). In this introductory seminar you learn what XML is and what it can and cannot do. How does XML work? What are its advantages? How will it be used in business? Discover the impact of XML on HTML and its potential uses in Internet publishing and e-commerce.

Course Approach

Throughout this class, there will be hands-on exercises where you will have a chance to put what you learn into practice. The main exercise that we do will be creating a well-formed and valid XML document, with a linked XSL stylesheet that converts your XML into HTML via the IE5 browser. We will use an XML editor, Microsoft XML Notepad to assist us.

In only three hours, it is difficult to cover all the XML related technologies, both from the big picture and from a hands-on approach but you will hopefully get a good “big picture” understanding of XML and start to get some hands-on experience that will help direct you into whether it’s something you wish to pursue further and if so, which direction since XML is used for so many different types of applications (and the related tools are often different). UBC Continuing Studies has a number of XML course offerings that you may wish to pursue after this course. There are also a lot of good resources on the Web for you to learn from (listed below).

Course Website

There is a website for this course located at:

http://www.quia.com/pages/ubcxml.html

If you have a question after the class, I would be happy to try helping you and at least referring you to a good resource on the Web if I don’t have an answer for you. You can reach me at cjones@zoomelearning.com

Course Materials

No textbook is required. Class notes and a course website will be used instead.

Instructional Methods

The instructional methods for this course will be a combination of lecture, discussion, website exercise and hands-on XML exercises.

Course Objectives

By the end of this course, students will be expected to be able to do the following:

Theoretical/conceptual:

Understand the evolution of XML (HTML vs. SGML vs. XML)
Understand the three main applications XML is used for
Understand the rapid growth of XML use in e-business and emerging web services
Understand the XML job trends
Ability to differentiate between client side and server side XML and their strengths and weaknesses and draw basic architecture
Know where to go for additional XML resources
Understand the advantages and disadvantages of using XML vs. a more traditional database approach
Understand some of the weaknesses and challenges of XML

Technical/software skills:

Create a well-formed XML document (elements, attributes, comments, xml declaration etc.)
Begin to create a valid XML document (simple DTD and DOCTYPE)
Utilize Microsoft XML Notepad Editor
Create namespaces
Create a simple XSL stylesheet and link to an XML document

Assessment

It is difficult to assess you after such a short course but the following assessment and criteria should be fair and provide you with some useful experience:

Grading:

Resume Project	80%
Participation	15%
Definitions Exercise	5%

The end of the class quiz will be quite easy so don’t stress out about that. It will be mainly multiple choice and will give you a chance to review what you have learned this evening.

Your resume project will be to:

a) Create a tree structure for the kinds of info you have in your resume

b) Transfer the tree structure into a well-formed XML document

c) Create a very simple XSL stylesheet (even if it’s just a table with a few pieces of info like the one we are going to do in class) and link to your XML document so that you can view your resume using IE5

You will have to submit by either emailing me the two files at cjones@zoomelearning.com or to email a link to a URL where you have posted.

d) Bonus marks if you also create a DTD (maximum bonus of 5%) and if you create a more sophisticated XSL stylesheet that nicely represents your resume (maximum bonus 5%).

XML Related Terminology

(from webopedia.com and techweb.com)

DTD	Document Type Declaration (DOCTYPE)	DOM
Industry specific mark up language	Namespaces	PCDATA
SGML	SOAP	Validating Parser
Valid XML	Web Services	Well formed XML
XForms	XLink	XML
XML Parser	XML Schema	XPath
XPointer	XSLT