XML Primer

XML Primer

What is XSLT?
XSLT stands for eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations. It is a language used to convert XML documents to XHTML or other XML documents. This conversion is done by transforming each XML element into an (X)HTML element.. it uses XPath to find information in a XML document. XSLT is nothing but transforming XSL’s.

Whats the difference between XSD and XSL?
XSL is a kind of scripting language for processing XML. The user can use syntax like if-then to process the XML. XSD on the other hand is to define XML as to where a tag would be placed or an element or an attribute. XSD stands for XML Schema Definition. Simple xsd file:-

Whats the difference between XSD and DTD?
XSD uses and xml based syntax while DTDs have a unique syntax using SGML. DTD predates XML and is pretty much deprecated. DTDs do not normally support name spaces while XSDs do.

XQuery and XPath?
XPath is a language that describes how to locate specific elements and attributes in a doc. Its based on a tree representation of the XML doc. XQuery can be coupled with XPath to retrieve data from an XML Document meeting certain requirements. XFactor API in Actionscript 2 can be used to do dynamic queries on XML in Adobe Flex. Similar APIs available in Java.

What is XML Indexing?
An index over XML data can be used to improve the efficiency of queries on XML documents. This is normally done in SQL/Oracle for XML datatype. Search engines like Lucene also provide with some of this capability.

What is OpenXML?
Open XML (also informally known as OOXML or OpenXML) is a zipped, XML-based file format developed by Microsoft for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing docs.