THE XML SPECIFICATION GUIDE

Book Outline and Content Description

The XML Specification Guide is divided into three parts. Part one presents a bootstrap overview of XML. Part two contains the complete XML 1.0 specification, with explanatory annotations. Last, Part three contains appendices that (a) describe technical standards (e.g., the Unicode character set) important for understanding important parts of the XML specification, and that (b) introduce some of the evolving, but as-yet incomplete, extensions to the base XML 1.0 standard.

Part 1: XML Overview and Bootstrap

This part contains nine short chapters that introduce all the core concepts and mechanisms of XML, using example documents to illustrate key concepts and issues. The topics covered in the chapters are:

Chapter 1. A Basic XML Document

Concepts Covered: prolog, XML declaration, encoding declaration, start-tag, end-tag, empty-element tag, comments, entity, well-formed documents, valid documents

Chapter 2. Declaring Markup: The Document Type Declaration

Concepts Covered: Document type declaration, element type declarations, content models, attribute list declarations, string attribute types, enumerated list attribute types, internal entities, general entities, entity references, standalone documents

Chapter 3. Internal Entities and Character References

Concepts Covered: Internal general and parameter entities (declarations and references), character references, entity replacement text

Chapter 4. Parameter and General Entities

Concepts Covered: External parsed entities (declarations, general, parameter, references), text declaration

Chapter 5. External and Internal Document Type Declaration Subsets

Concepts Covered: external subset, internal subset, conditional section

Chapter 6. Unparsed Entities and Tokenized Attribute Types

Concepts Covered: unparsed entities, notation declarations, entity tokenized attribute types

Chapter 7. Notation Attribute Types and Processing Instructions

Concepts Covered: processing instructions, notation attribute types

Chapter 8. ID and Name Token Attribute Types

Concepts Covered: ID, IDREF, and IDREFS attribute types, NMTOKEN and NMTOKENS attribute types

Chapter 9. CDATA Marked Sections and Language Identification

Concepts Covered: language identification, CDATA marked sections

Part 2: The XML Specification

This part contains the complete text of the XML 1.0 specification, including explanatory annotations and examples.

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. Documents

Chapter 3. Logical Structures

Chapter 4. Physical Structures

Chapter 5. Conformance

Chapter 6. Notation

Appendix A. References

Appendix B. Character Classes

Appendix C. XML and SGML (Non-Normative)

Appendix D. Expansion of Entity and Character References (Non-Normative)

Appendix E. Deterministic Content Models (Non-Normative)

Appendix F. Autodetection of Character Encodings (Non-Normative)

Appendix G. W3C XML Working Group (Non-Normative)

Part 3: Technical Appendices

This part of the book contains appendices that (a) describe technical standards (e.g., the Unicode character set) important for understanding important parts of the XML specification, and that (b) introduce some of the evolving, but as-yet incomplete, extensions to the base XML 1.0 standard.

Annotated Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) for XML

The complete EBNF for XML, including XML Well-formedness and validity constraints. This concise appendix contains the complete technical specification for XML.

Appendix B. Character Sets, Character Encodings, and Document Character Sets

A detailed description of the Unicode character set and of the digital encoding of character data.

Appendix C. Identifying Languages: RFC 1766

A description of the Internet RFC document that defines how human languages are specified in Internet applications.

Appendix D. XML for HTML Experts

A brief summary of the most important differences between XML and HTML, written for the HTML "expert."

Appendix E. XML Namespaces

An overview of how namespaces are likely to be supported in a future version of XML.

Appendix F. Schema or DTD?

A description of how XML can itself be used to define a schema for XML documents.

Appendix G. Layout of Document Type Declarations

A set of good practices guidelines for laying out XML DTDs for easy reading and error detection.

Glossary. A glossary of XML terms.

ISBN 0-471-32753-0
464 Pages
February, 1999

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