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A.2 Anatomy of an XML DocumentThe best way to explain how an XML document is composed is to present one. The following example shows an XML document you might use to describe two authors: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="us-ascii"?>
<authors>
<person id="lear">
<name>Edward Lear</name>
<nationality>British</nationality>
</person>
<person id="asimov">
<name>Isaac Asimov</name>
<nationality>American</nationality>
</person>
<person id="mysteryperson"/>
</authors>
The first line of the document is known as the XML declaration. This tells a processing application which version of XML you are using (the version indicator is mandatory) and which character encoding you have used for the document. In this example, the document is encoded in ASCII. (The significance of character encoding is covered later in this chapter.) If the XML declaration is omitted, a processor will make certain assumptions about your document. In particular, it will expect it to be encoded in UTF-8, an encoding of the Unicode character set. However, it is best to use the XML declaration wherever possible, both to avoid confusion over the character encoding and to indicate to processors which version of XML you're using. A.2.1 Elements and AttributesThe second line of the example begins an element, which has been named authors. The contents of that element include everything between the right angle bracket (>) in <authors> and the left angle bracket (<) in </authors>. The actual syntactic constructs <authors> and </authors> are often referred to as the element start tag and end tag, respectively. Do not confuse tags with elements! Note that elements may include other elements, as well as text. An XML document must contain exactly one root element, which contains all other content within the document. The name of the root element defines the type of the XML document. Elements that contain both text and other elements simultaneously are classified as mixed content. RSS doesn't generally use mixed content. The sample authors document uses elements named person to describe the authors themselves. Each person element has an attribute named id. Unlike elements, attributes can contain only textual content. Their values must be surrounded by quotes. Either single quotes (') or double quotes (") may be used, as long as you use the same kind of closing quote as the opening one. Within XML documents, attributes are frequently used for metadata (i.e., "data about data"), describing properties of the element's contents. This is the case in our example, where id contains a unique identifier for the person being described. As far as XML is concerned, the order in which attributes are presented in the element start tag does not matter. For example, these two elements contain the same information, as far as an XML 1.0-conformant processing application is concerned: <animal name="dog" legs="4"/> <animal legs="4" name="dog"/> On the other hand, the information presented to an application by an XML processor upon reading the following two lines will be different for each animal element, because the ordering of elements is significant: <animal><name>dog</name><legs>4</legs></animal> <animal><legs>4</legs><name>dog</name></animal> XML treats a set of attributes like a bunch of stuff in a bag � there is no implicit ordering � while elements are treated like items on a list, where ordering matters. New XML developers frequently ask when it is best to use attributes to represent information and when it is best to use elements. As you can see from the authors example, if order is important to you, then elements are a good choice. In general, there is no hard-and-fast "best practice" for choosing whether to use attributes or elements. The final author described in our document has no information available. All we know about this person is his or her id, mysteryperson. The document uses the XML shortcut syntax for an empty element. The following is a reasonable alternative: <person id="mysteryperson"></person> A.2.2 Name SyntaxXML 1.0 has certain rules about element and attribute names. In particular:
A precise description of names can be found in Section 2.3 of the XML 1.0 specification, at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-common-syn. A.2.3 Well-FormednessAn XML document that conforms to the rules of XML syntax is known as well-formed. At its most basic level, well-formedness means that elements should be properly matched, and all opened elements should be closed. A formal definition of well-formedness can be found in Section 2.1 of the XML 1.0 specification, at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-well-formed. Table A-1 shows some XML documents that are not well-formed.
A.2.4 CommentsAs in HTML, it is possible to include comments within XML documents. XML comments are intended to be read only by people. With HTML, developers have occasionally employed comments to add application-specific functionality. For example, the server-side include functionality of most web servers uses instructions embedded in HTML comments. XML provides other means of indicating application processing instructions. A discussion of processing instructions (PIs) is outside the scope of this book. For more information on PIs, see Section 2.6 of the XML 1.0 specification, at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-pi. Comments should not be used for any purpose other than those for which they were intended. The start of a comment is indicated with <!--, and the end of the comment is indicated with -->. Any sequence of characters, aside from the string --, may appear within a comment. Comments tend to be used more in XML documents intended for human consumption than those intended for machine consumption. Comments aren't widely used in RSS. A.2.5 Entity ReferencesAnother feature of XML that is occasionally useful when writing RSS documents is the mechanism for escaping characters. Because some characters have special significance in XML, there needs to be a way to represent them. For example, in some cases the < symbol might really be intended to mean "less than," rather than to signal the start of an element name. Clearly, just inserting the character without any escaping mechanism would result in a poorly formed document, because a processing application would assume you were starting another element. Another instance of this problem is needing to include both double quotes and single quotes simultaneously in an attribute's value. Here's an example that illustrates both these difficulties: <badDoc>
<para>
I'd really like to use the < character
</para>
<note title="On the proper 'use' of the " character"/>
</badDoc>
XML avoids this problem by the use of the predefined entity reference. The word entity in the context of XML simply means a unit of content. The term entity reference means just that, a symbolic way of referring to a certain unit of content. XML predefines entities for the following symbols: left angle bracket (<), right angle bracket (>), apostrophe ('), double quote ("), and ampersand (&). An entity reference is introduced with an ampersand (&), which is followed by a name (using the word "name" in its formal sense, as defined by the XML 1.0 specification), and terminated with a semicolon (;). Table A-2 shows how the five predefined entities can be used within an XML document.
Here's our problematic document, revised to use entity references: <badDoc>
<para>
I'd really like to use the < character
</para>
<note title="On the proper ' use ' of the "character"/>
</badDoc>
Being able to use the predefined entities is often all you need for RSS; in general, entities are provided as a convenience for human-created XML. XML 1.0 allows you to define your own entities and use entity references as shortcuts in your document. Section 4 of the XML 1.0 specification, available at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-physical-struct, describes the use of entities. A.2.6 Character ReferencesYou may find character references in the context of RSS documents. Character references allow you to denote a character by its numeric position in Unicode character set (this position is known as its code point). Table A-3 contains a few examples that illustrate the syntax.
Note that the code point can be expressed in decimal or, with the use of x as a prefix, in hexadecimal. A.2.7 Character EncodingsThe subject of character encodings is frequently a mysterious one for developers. Most code tends to be written for one computing platform and, normally, to run within one organization. Although the Internet is changing things quickly, most of us have never had cause to think too deeply about internationalization. XML, designed to be an Internet-friendly syntax for information exchange, has internationalization at its very core. One of the basic requirements for XML processors is that they support the Unicode standard character encoding. Unicode attempts to include the requirements of all the world's languages within one character set. Consequently, it is very large! A.2.7.1 Unicode encoding schemesUnicode 3.0 has more than 57,700 code points, each of which corresponds to a character. (You can obtain charts of all these characters online by visiting http://www.unicode.org/charts/.) If you were to express a Unicode string by using the position of each character in the character set as its encoding (in the same way as ASCII does), expressing the whole range of characters would require four octets for each character. (An octet is a string of eight binary digits, or bits. A byte is commonly, but not always, considered the same thing as an octet.) Clearly, if a document is written in 100 percent American English, it will be 4 times larger than required � all the characters in ASCII fitting into a 7-bit representation. This places a strain on both storage space and on memory requirements for processing applications. Fortunately, two encoding schemes for Unicode alleviate this problem: UTF-8 and UTF-16. As you might guess from their names, applications can process documents in these encodings in 8- or 16-bit segments at a time. When code points are required in a document that cannot be represented by one chunk, a bit-pattern is used to indicate that the following chunk is required to calculate the desired code point. In UTF-8, this is denoted by the most significant bit of the first octet being set to 1. This scheme means that UTF-8 is a highly efficient encoding for representing languages using Latin alphabets, such as English. All of the ASCII character set is represented natively in UTF-8 � an ASCII-only document and its equivalent in UTF-8 are identical byte-for-byte. This knowledge will also help you debug encoding errors. One frequent error arises because of the fact that ASCII is a proper subset of UTF-8 � programmers get used to this fact and produce UTF-8 documents, but use them as if they were ASCII. Things start to go awry when the XML parser processes a document containing, for example, characters such as Á. Because this character cannot be represented using only one octet in UTF-8, this produces a two-octet sequence in the output document; in a non-Unicode viewer or text editor, it looks like a couple of characters of garbage. A.2.7.2 Other character encodingsUnicode, in the context of computing history, is a relatively new invention. Native operating system support for Unicode is by no means widespread. For instance, although Windows NT offers Unicode support, Windows 95 and 98 do not. XML 1.0 allows a document to be encoded in any character set registered with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). European documents are commonly encoded in one of the ISO Latin character sets, such as ISO-8859-1. Japanese documents commonly use Shift-JIS, and Chinese documents use GB2312 and Big 5. A full list of registered character sets can be found at http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets. XML processors are not required by the XML 1.0 specification to support any more than UTF-8 and UTF-16, but most commonly support other encodings, such as US-ASCII and ISO-8859-1. Although most RSS transactions are currently conducted in ASCII (or the ASCII subset of UTF-8), there is nothing to stop RSS documents from containing, say, Korean text. However, you will probably have to dig into the encoding support of your computing platform to find out if it is possible for you to use alternate encodings. A.2.8 ValidityIn addition to well-formedness, XML 1.0 offers another level of verification, called validity. To explain why validity is important, let's take a simple example. Imagine you invented a simple XML format for your friends' telephone numbers: <phonebook>
<person>
<name>Albert Smith</name>
<number>123-456-7890</number>
</person>
<person>
<name>Bertrand Jones</name>
<number>456-123-9876</number>
</person>
</phonebook>
Based on your format, you also construct a program to display and search your phone numbers. This program turns out to be so useful, you share it with your friends. However, your friends aren't so hot on detail as you are, and they try to feed your program this phone book file: <phonebook>
<person>
<name>Melanie Green</name>
<phone>123-456-7893</phone>
</person>
</phonebook>
Note that, although this file is perfectly well-formed, it doesn't fit the format you prescribed for the phone book, and you find you need to change your program to cope with this situation. If your friends had used number as you did to denote the phone number, and not phone, there wouldn't have been a problem. However, as it is, this second file is not a valid phonebook document. A.2.8.1 Document Type Definitions (DTDs)For validity to be a useful general concept, we need a machine-readable way of saying what a valid document is � that is, which elements and attributes must be present and in what order. XML 1.0 achieves this by introducing document type definitions (DTDs). For the purposes of RSS, you don't need to know much about DTDs. Rest assured that RSS does have a DTD, and it spells out in detail exactly which combinations of elements and attributes make up a valid document. The purpose of a DTD is to express the allowed elements and attributes in a certain document type and to constrain the order in which they must appear within that document type. A DTD is generally composed of one file, which contains declarations defining the element types and attribute lists. (In theory, a DTD may span more than one file; however, the mechanism for including one file inside another � parameter entities � is outside the scope of this book.) It is common to mistakenly conflate element and element types. The distinction is that an element is the actual instance of the structure as found in an XML document, whereas the element type is the kind of element that the instance is. A.2.9 Putting It TogetherIf you want to validate RSS against a DTD, you may need to know how to link a document to its defining DTD. This is done with a document type declaration, <!DOCTYPE ...>, inserted at the beginning of the XML document, after the XML declaration in our fictitious example: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="us-ascii"?>
<!DOCTYPE authors SYSTEM "http://example.com/authors.dtd">
<authors>
<person id="lear">
<name>Edward Lear</name>
<nationality>British</nationality>
</person>
<person id="asimov">
<name>Isaac Asimov</name>
<nationality>American</nationality>
</person>
<person id="mysteryperson"/>
</authors>
This example assumes the DTD file has been placed on a web server at example.com. Note that the document type declaration specifies the root element of the document, not the DTD itself. You could use the same DTD to define person, name, or nationality as the root element of a valid document. Certain DTDs, such as the DocBook DTD for technical documentation (see http://www.docbook.org), use this feature to good effect, allowing you to provide the same DTD for multiple document types. A validating XML processor is obligated to check the input document against its DTD. If it does not validate, the document is rejected. To return to the phone book example, if your application validated its input files against a phone book DTD, you would have been spared the problems of debugging your program and correcting your friend's XML, because your application would have rejected the document as being invalid. While some of the programs that read RSS files do worry about validation, most do not. A.2.10 XML NamespacesXML 1.0 lets developers create their own elements and attributes, but it leaves open the potential for overlapping names. "Title" in one context may mean something entirely different than "Title" in a different context. The "Namespaces in XML" specification (which can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names) provides a mechanism developers can use to identify particular vocabularies using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). RSS 1.0 uses the URI http://purl.org/rss/1.0/ for its base namespace. The URI is just an identifier � opening that page in a web browser reveals some links to the RSS, XML 1.0, and Namespaces in XML specifications. Programs processing documents with multiple vocabularies can use the namespaces to figure out which vocabulary they are handling at any given point in a document. Namespaces are very simple on the surface but are a well-known field of combat in XML arcana. For more information on namespaces, see XML In a Nutshell or Learning XML. The use of namespaces in RSS is discussed in much greater detail in Chapter 6 and Chapter 7. |
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