Practical XML for the Web

You've heard the hype and the excitement - now here's a book that brings practicality to the party. In context, but avoiding lengthy history lessons, we show you why XML is great to get into, and how to get up and running with it quickly. Using XML appropriately can make your markup future-proof and standards-compliant, enhance accessibility and usability, and allow data to be shared between almost any language/platform combinations and rendered in any future browsers.

This book teaches you everything you need to know about using XML effectively in your work today, ommitting endless pages of theory, history lessons, and as-yet-unsupported standards and technologies.

After reading this book you will be able to effectively use:

1. Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) to transform XML, not only into differently structured XML pages, but also into different markup languages for different purposes.
2. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to style XML/XHTML data for display in a browser.
3. JavaScript for further manipulation of XML (for example, via the XML DOM).
4. Server-side scripting languages to generate XML.

This book is for web professionals of all levels who want to know how XML can be put to great practical use in their work today. It assumes some basic knowledge of HTML, but it takes you through the basic theory of XML, assuming no prior knowledge. Some knowledge of JavaScript, and server-side languages would be advantageous, but ample references are provided to help you along the way.