Pardi William J. XML in Action Web Technology

About This Book
As a dedicated observer of XML development and a participant in its implementation almost since its creation, I have been amazed to witness the degree to which the software industry has come to support this technology. It has become rare to pick up a computer magazine or look at an industry Web site without seeing something about XML. As you might imagine, I believe in the need for and benefits of XML, and I want it to succeed. The developers of XML and its many applications and vocabularies realize that for XML to be used and adopted widely, it not only must be easy to understand, it must be supported by resources that help make it easy to use. In my own work with XML, I have seen the need for practical XML resources. My hope is that this book contributes to the pool of effective tools that help developers and authors work successfully with XML.The Focus of This Book
There are several implementations of XML, and there are many XML processors. This book focuses on the implementation of XML in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 and on the Microsoft XML processor, called Msxml. I point this out because there are special features regarding the use of XML in Internet Explorer 5 that are distinct from the functionality of the Msxml processor. These special Internet Explorer features are addressed in Chapter 11, and I do not focus on them throughout most of the book. Rather, I attempt to deal directly with the XML language itself and the Msxml processor. This should afford you, the XML author, the most flexibility in the event that Microsoft decides to make the processor available outside of the browser. While all the examples in this book and on the companion CD will work in Internet Explorer 5, they will also work in earlier versions of Internet Explorer or in other applications (such as Microsoft Visual Basic or C++ applications) that use the current version of Msxml. (Note that at the time of this writing, Microsoft does not support the use of Msxml outside of Internet Explorer 5, but it's possible that policy will be reevaluated in the future.) The only exception to my focus on the Msxml processor is Chapter 7, "Linking with XML." XLink and XPointer—two vocabularies focused on linking with XML—are not currently supported by Msxml in Internet Explorer
5. Nevertheless, I included a chapter on this topic because it is an important part of XML and will eventually be part of many XML solutions.