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Well, I suggest taking a look at the following
sites:
There are also several good books out there that
will give you all sorts of different perspectives on what can be done with
XML. If you are looking for a general understanding of XML, I suggest
downloading the XML specification from the W3C (there is also a good book in the
Goldfarb series called "The Annotated XML" which is an annotated version of the
specification). Otherwise, there are several good books out there that
will give you a broad understanding of several of the most popular uses of
XML.
One thing to note, however, is that XML is not
something you "run", exactly... XML is only a specification for marking up
information. Some people use it to store data (XML database, object
database, etc.). Others use it to send Remote Procedure Call messages over
the network (XML-RPC, SOAP, etc.). Still others use it to augment the
handling and modification of other XML documents (XML Namespaces, XSLT, XML
Schema, RELAX, Schematron, XPath, etc.). Some use it to define
standardized document structures that are industry-specific as well as generic
(ebXML, SMBXML, etc.) And other use it in ways that are similar to its
SGML roots (XHTML, etc.).
XML is used in all sorts of ways. Many, many
more ways than I have mentioned here, in fact. The uses for XML are
nearly limitless. You just need to figure out if you need it. If you
do, then see if someone has already done some or all of the work for you (why
reinvent the wheel?). If so, use it (if you can). If not, write your
own specification.
In order to act upon an XML document, you will need to also look into an
XML parser. There are several out now and each have their own strengths
and weaknesses. You can work with a DOM parser that will take an XML
document and parse it into the DOM (I believe Microsoft's MSXML is the most
commonly used DOM parser). You can work with an event-driven parser such
as SAX or expat, where you set event handlers for each type of event and process
the XML document as it's being parsed. There are other parsers out there
as well, some are generic in nature while others handle specific tasks (such as
XSL tranformations). Some considerations in choosing a parser are things
like what platform you are running on, what language you are using, how large or
complex the documents you will be dealing with are, whether you want to use
something that is open source or not, etc. In the end, you are sure to
find at least one parser that will fit your needs (or most of them,
anyhow).
p.s. I just noticed that w3schools isn't
replying at the moment... don't know why...
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