CMT3315 Lab 06 - Character Encoding

Today's post deals with character encoding and how it can be specified in XML documents. Character Encoding Character encoding is the process of converting any character into another form which facilitates its transmission over a telecommunications network or its storage. Early examples of character encoding are Morse code - which converts characters into a series of long and short presses...

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CMT3315 Lab 05 - XML Well-formedness & DTDs

The last post covered the basics of XML syntax and document type definitions. This weeks post is a continuation, answering some more questions related to XML well formedness and DTDs. Where possible, lab questions were reproduced before providing the answer. Quick Questions Q1. <:-/> This is a smiley.  Is it also a well-formed XML document?  Say why. From a structural point...

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CMT3315 LAB04 - XML Syntax 2

Today's post introduces Document Type Definition (DTD) syntax and answers a number of questions relating to XML syntax and DTDs. Document Type Definition In last week's post we created the following XML document containing information about a small music collection: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <DOCTYPE musicCollection> <!--Prolog ends here. --> <musicCollection> <cd index="1"> <title>Innuendo</title> <artist>Queen</artist> <tracks> ...

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CMT3315 Lab 03 - XML Syntax 1

Today's post introduces the basics of XML syntax and answers a number of questions related to this topic. XML document structure & syntax The basic idea behind XML is to produce documents whose structure can be understood by software applications. In an XML document, pieces of text that have special meaning are marked up using tags. A tag is simply a word between angle brackets such as "<name>". An XML document is made up of 3 parts: A prolog (optional); The document or root element; Other miscellaneous content following...

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CMT3315 LAB 02 - XML vs HTML

In this post we will be having a look at the similarities and differences between XML and HTML. As discussed in my previous post XML is a subset of SGML designed to make the knowledge structure of a document known to a software package. In essence, it enables a software package to "understand" the structure of a document. HTML was also derived from SGML but appeared before XML. HTML HTML is made up of a standard set of tags specifically designed to create web pages meant to be understood and displayed by web browsers. Soon after its...

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CMT3315 Intro - XML, What it is and where it came from

Given the summer recess, it has been a while since my last post but it's time to pull the proverbial socks up and get back to work.  During this semester, the blog will be focusing mostly on the eXtensible Markup Language - XML for short - and there's a lot to cover, so let's get right to it: First Things First So what is XML? Before answering that question one must understand where XML comes from and more importantly its purpose.  To do that we need to take a look at the early days of computing, back in the 1960's,...

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