Part I: XML for E-Commerce

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Part I

At its core, the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple syntax that allows you to create markup languages—called schemas—that describe your data. In practice, XML is much more than that. XML enables you to communicate with your business partners in a way that is not possible with any other technology.

To build applications that take advantage of this communication capability, you need to understand basic XML syntax and a couple of related standards. Part I of the book discusses XML from the perspective of building e-commerce transactions and covers these standards as well as well-formed XML documents, schemas, issues you need to consider when programming with the XML object model, and the importance of transforming documents from one schema to another using the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) for Transformations (XSLT).