- Markup Languages
- What Does XML Look Like?
- What Does XML Look Like in a Browser?
- What's So Great About XML?
- Well-Formed XML Documents
- Valid XML Documents
- Parsing XML Yourself
- XML Resources
- XML Editors
- XML Browsers
- XML Parsers
- XML Validators
- CSS and XSL
- XLinks and XPointers
- URLs Versus URIs
- ASCII, Unicode, and the Universal Character System
- XML Applications
XML Parsers
XML parsers are software packages that you use as part of an application such as Oracle 8i, which includes good XML support, or as part of your own programs. You use an XML parser to dissect XML documents and gain access to the data in them. Starting in Chapter 10, you'll see how to put Sun Microsystems's Java language to work with XML. The current version of Java, version 1.4, contains a great deal of built-in support for working with XML. Here's a list of some of the other XML parsers out there:
SAX: The Simple API for XML—SAX is a well-known parser written by David Megginson, et al. (http://www.megginson.com/SAX/index.html), that uses event-based parsing I'll use SAX in this book.
expat—This is a famous XML parser written in the C programming language by James Clark (http://www.jclark.com/ xml/expat.html). This is the parser that's used in Netscape Navigator 6 and in the Perl language's XML::Parser module.
expat as a Perl Module (XML::Parser)—This parser is maintained by Clark Cooper (ftp://ftp.perl.org/pub/CPAN/modules/by-module/XML/).
TclExpat—This is a parser written for use in the Tcl programming language (http://tclxml.sourceforge.net/)
LT XML—This is an XML developers' toolkit from the Language Technology Group at the University of Edinburgh (http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/software/xml/).
XML for Java (XML4J)—From IBM AlphaWorks (http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/xml4j), this is a famous and very widely used XML parser that adheres well to the W3C standards.
XML Microsoft's Validating XML Processor—This parser and various tools, samples, tutorials, and online documentation can be found at msdn.microsoft.com/xml/default.asp.
XP—This is a nonvalidating XML processor written in Java by James Clark (http://www.jclark.com/xml/xp/index.html).
Python and XML Processing Preliminary XML Parser—This parser offers XML support to the Python programming language (http://www.python.org/topics/xml/).
XML Testbed—This one was written by Steve Withall (http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/08withall/).
SXP Silfide XML Parser (SXP)—This is another famous XML parser and, in fact, a complete XML application programming interface (API) for Java (http://www.loria.fr/projets/XSilfide/EN/sxp/).
Parsers will break up your document into its component pieces and make them accessible to other parts of a program, as we'll see later in this book; some parsers check for well-formedness, and fewer check for document validity. However, if you just want to check that your XML is both well formed and valid, all you need is an XML validator.