XML Course Materials: Week 13

Materials used in the lecture

1. RELAX NG Tutorial (errata), OASIS Committee Specification, 3 December 2001. This is a tutorial for RELAX NG using the XML syntax.
2. RELAX NG Compact Syntax Tutorial, OASIS Working Draft, 26 March 2003. This is a tutorial for RELAX NG using the compact syntax, not assuming prior knowledge of XML syntax.
3. Compare an XHTML module implementation for Ruby in Relax NG, with the XHTML Ruby module in XML Schema (which we covered in week 12), and with the original XHTML Ruby module in DTD (which we covered in week 10).

More resources on the Web

1. Several XML vocabularies have been specified in Relax NG. You may want to take a look at the following:

   • The Atom Syndication Format. Atom is an XML-based Web content and metadata syndication format. Its format is published as IETF RFC (Request for Comments) no. 4287. The Atom syndication format uses the Relax NG Compact Syntax to formally specify the document structure of the "feeds".
   • The DocBook Schema Version 5.0. From the Specification: "DocBook is a general purpose XML schema particularly well suited to books and papers about computer hardware and software (though it is by no means limited to these applications). The Version 5.0 release is a complete rewrite of DocBook in RELAX NG." The DocBook 5.0 schema is also provided in other schema languages, including W3C XML Schema, an XML DTD, and Schematron, but the RELAX NG Schema is considered the normative schema.

2. There is an online service at http://validator.nu for validating XML documents against schemas written in Relax NG. To use it, however, you must put the Relax NG Schema document on the web so that it is accessible by a URL. You can use the following two links (which I have prepared from examples in the RELAX NG Tutorial) to test this online validator:

   • XML document instance: addr.xml
   • Relax NG schema document: addr.rng

   Note: You may want to set the following switches:

   Encoding: As set by the server/page	
   Preset: None	
   Parser: XML: don't load external entities
   

   and check the following box:

   Be lax about HTTP Content-Type