Chapter 1. XML and ASP.NET: The Basics

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Welcome to XML and ASP.NET . Hopefully, you noticed in the title just what this book is about: XML is covered in respect to how it applies to ASP.NET. Before jumping in, this chapter looks at some basic concepts.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is just data. That's it. Think of it as data in a file, or data in a string, or data in a stream. XML is just data. XML is not a messaging protocol; it is not a wire transfer specification. XML is just data and how data is represented. Much hype and confusion surrounds XML's definition and what it does for your applications. This chapter makes it clear that XML is just a unified way to represent data.

XML is a rapidly evolving technology, but note that markup languages have existed since computers existed.Various markup formats existed to try to separate content from presentation, and developers often created their own formats for custom needs. This created a need for proprietary parsers, which were applications developed to recognize a certain set of symbols, or markup , to read the data contained in a file.

Consider some of the markup formats that you might still regularly use in applications. Rich Text Formatting (RTF) is used in programs such as Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word also supports a native format, which changes slightly from version to version. WordPerfect documents use a slightly different markup to represent the data contained in them. The result is that you need a special add-in to read a WordPerfect document from Microsoft Word.

XML changes the need for different markup formats and parsers by standardizing certain aspects of what an XML document looks like, while allowing custom dialects to represent data. This chapter looks at the components of an XML document, discusses the formal XML 1.0 Specification, and talks about standards bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and its role in XML and its related technologies. This chapter provides an overview and focuses on the terms that are important to understand XML within the context of .NET. It is not, however, a complete reference to the entire set of XML recommendations.

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XML and ASP. NET
XML and ASP.NET
ISBN: B000H2MXOM
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 184

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