• XML Defined
• Benefits of Using XML, comparison to HTML
• SGML and the origins of XML.
• The XML standard and how it relates to the other standards (XSL, XPath, DOM, SAX, etc).
• Some real life XML applications.

The XML Document

• Structure of the XML document.
• The document body
• Elements, tags, and attributes.
• Prolog, XML Declaration and PIs.
• Entities, CDATA
• Well-formed XML
• XML syntax and parsing.

Namespaces

• The Motivating Problem
• The Namespace Solution (Definition, qualified names, URIs, prefixes)
• Namespace scope and overriding
• Default Namespaces
• Namespaces and Attributes

Valid XML Documents

• Definition of a valid document
• Definition of a schema
• Schema Languages

XML Schema

• General Form of an XML Schema
• Elements, Attributes and Types
• Element Definitions
• Simple Types
• Primitive and Derived Datatypes
• Complex Types - Sequence, Choice, All
• Element Occurrence Constraints
• Attribute Definitions
• Attribute Occurrence Constraints
• SimpleContent Type
• Using XML Schema with Namespaces

The Document Type Definition (DTD) Overview

• The role and functions of a DTD.
• Specifying internal and external DTDs.
• Specifying elements and attributes.
• Specifying internal and external entities.
• Defining Elements
• Defining Attibutes
• CDATA and NMTOKEN
• DTD conformance and valid XML documents.
• Comparison of XML Schema to DTD
• Since DTDs are being phased out in favor of XML Schemas, we present only an overview here

XML Schema Advanced Topics

• Element and Attribute Group Definitions
• Defining New Types
• Facets
• Defining new Simple Types by Restriction, Enumeration, List, Union
• Defining new Complex Types by Extension and Restriction
• Generic Types

XML and Java

• How Java and XML work together.
• JAXP:  the Java XML API.
• Data Modeling:  relating XML and Java structures.
• Generating XML from Java.
• Basic parsing concepts.
• Getting and using XML parsers for Java.
• Event-driven and tree-based parsing.
• The role of SAX and DOM.

The SAX 2.0 Interface

• Basic SAX design goals and implementation.
• The parser interface and methods.
• The ContentHandler interface and methods.
• SAXExceptions and the ErrorHandler Interface.
• The EntityResolver interface and methods.
• The DTDHandler interface and methods.
• Using SAX with validating parsers.
• Other SAX features and interfaces.

The DOM 2.0 Interface

• What the DOM standard is.
• The DOM Java binding.
• The DOM node tree.
• The Node interface and methods.
• Entity, Document, and other DOM subclasses
• Building and traversing a DOM tree.
• Modifying and transforming DOM trees.
• Using DOM to generate or transform XML.
• Using DOM with validating parsers.

Additional Topics

• Other APIs
• Performance Issues
• JAXB Overview
• JDOM Overview