Kevin Howard Goldberg - XML: Visual QuickStart Guide

Visual QuickStart Guide

Kevin Howard Goldberg

Visual QuickStart Guide
XML, Second Edition
Kevin Howard Goldberg

Peachpit Press
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Berkeley, CA 94710
510/524-2178
510/524-2221 (fax)

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Peachpit Press is a division of Pearson Education

Copyright 2009 by Elizabeth Castro and Kevin Howard Goldberg

Production Editor: David Van Ness
Tech Editors: Chris Hare and Michael Weiss
Compositor: Kevin Howard Goldberg
Indexer: Valerie Perry
Cover Design: Peachpit Press

Notice of Rights

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information on getting permission for reprints and excerpts, contact .

Notice of Liability

The information in this book is distributed on an As Is basis without warranty. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of the book, neither the author nor Peachpit shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this book or by the computer software and hardware products described in it.

Trademarks

Visual QuickStart Guide is a trademark of Peachpit, a division of Pearson Education.

Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and Peachpit was aware of a trademark claim, the designations appear as requested by the owner of the trademark. All other product names and services identified throughout this book are used in editorial fashion only and for the benefit of such companies with no intention of infringement of the trademark. No such use, or the use of any trade name, is intended to convey endorsement or other affiliation with this book.

ISBN-13: 978-0-321-55967-8
ISBN-10: 0-321-55967-3

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed and bound in the United States of America

XML has come a long way since I wrote the first edition of this book in 2001. It is as widespread now as it was exotic then.

Last year, I bumped into my friend Kevin Goldberg on a visit to California. We had known each other in college, and had played a lot of Boggle together in Barcelona.

When he offered to help me revise this book, I jumped at the chance. Kevin has been working in the computer industry for more than twenty years. He started his career as a video game programmer and producer. Since 1997, Kevin has been serving as partner and chief technology officer at imagistic , an award-winning, Web development and services company in Southern California. In this role, he is regularly called upon to help clients clarify their business needs, and to clearly communicate the nature and applicability of potential technology solutionsin a sense, demystify technology.

Besides all of these apt credentials, Kevin is a great guy. He is smart, conscientious, creative, andnot to mentioncareful with details. In addition to updating the content and examples in the book, he added chapters on XSL-FO, recent W3C recommendations (XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0 and XQuery 1.0), and a chapter devoted to real world examples called XML in Practice. I am most confident that you will find this second edition of XML: Visual QuickStart Guide to be an excellent tutorial for learning all about XML.

Elizabeth Castro

Author of XML for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide

Kevin Howard Goldberg has been working with computers since 1976 when he taught himself BASIC on his elementary schools PDP 11/70. Since then, Kevins career has included management consulting using commerce simulations, and lead software development for numerous video game titles in multi-million dollar divisions at Film Roman and Lionsgate (previously Trimark). In his current capacity, he runs technology operations for a world-class Internet Strategy, Marketing and Development company in Westlake Village, California.

Kevin serves on the Santa Monica College Computer Science and Information Systems Advisory Board, and was invited to speak at the ACLU Nationwide Staff Conference as a Web development and production expert.

Kevin holds a bachelors degree in Economics and Entrepreneurial Management from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and is a candidate for a masters degree in Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles.

This book is dedicated to my wife, Lainie; in exchange for harried weekends, night-time surrogates, and an overcrowded bedroom, she receives this book. I am truly blessed.

Michael Weiss , my business partner (of more than eleven years), my brother-in-law, and my friend. His support throughout this process; uncanny ability to see things from a readers perspective; and willingness to do what it took to get the job done, while I was, at times, preoccupied, was invaluable to me.

Chris Hare , my technical editor, for jumping into the XML deep-end and amazingly keeping everything else afloat; teaching me the subtleties of punctuation (colons, semicolons, and parenthetical expressions, oh my!); and being so detailed that when a page came back with less than a dozen red marks, I was concerned.

The staff at imagistic(Chris, Heidi, Robert, Sam, Tamara, and Will ), who didnt know what was coming, but nonetheless kept all the plates spinning with grace and humor.

David Van Ness , Peachpits production editor extraordinaire, who was so incredibly helpful, resourceful, accommodating, available, and patient.

Nancy Davis , editor-in-chief at Peachpit, for seeing all the possibilities and shepherding this complex process through to completion.

Finally, a very special thanks to Elizabeth Castro , whose openness, honesty, integrity, and first edition of this book made this second edition possible.

Herodotus head in the Stoa of Attalus, Athens (Inv. S270), photograph by Samuel Provost.

Depictions of The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, as painted by 16th-century Dutch artist Marten Jacobszoon Heemskerk van Veen, reside within the public domain.

Internet time. A phrase whose meaning has come about as fast as it suggests; happening significantly faster than one could normally expect . In 1991, the first Web site was put online. Now, less than twenty years later, the number of Web sites online is thought to be more than one hundred million, give or take a few.

The amount of information available through the Internet has become practically uncountable. Most of that information is written in HTML (HyperText Markup Language), a simple but elegant way of displaying data in a Web browser. HTMLs simplicity has helped fuel the popularity of the Web. However, when faced with the Internets huge and growing quantity of information, it has presented real limitations.

In the seven years since the first edition of this book was published, XML ( eXtensible Markup Language