On Sat, 2014-10-25 at 21:48 -0400, Alan Feuerbacher wrote: > Basically, test that it's valid, but in particular that certain W3C > things work. For me this is a learning exercise.
Ok, but in that case, make sure you distinguish between XML itself, and things which use XML-based documents (of which there are millions). XML itself is just a set of rules for creating structured text files - it says nothing about the contents of those files. > > The book I'm going through, "XML: Go Beyond the Basics...", copyright > 2009, uses an XML "application" called MathML (math markup language) > from W3C as an example. Concerning seeing the results of using this, it > says that normal browsers like Firefox don't understand this markup > language, but that: That's untrue now, though might have been correct back in 2009. Firefox has excellent MathML support... indeed, I think it's the only major browser which does. But that goes back to the point I raise above - MathML is just one particular way of using XML... in this case, as a way of expressing mathematical expressions in text, such that a MathML browser can render it. > Now that I've gone through more of the book, I'm beginning to think that > there are other, newer ways of validating XML code, but I think I've > barely scratched the surface of learning what's available. Most of the time I'm dealing with XML files, it's at work where I'm using an IDE like Eclipse, which has decent built-in tools for editing and validating XML files. Also, note that there's two definitions of "valid" - one is simply that the file is correctly structured XML, without regard for the content. The other is that the file correctly matches some XML schema which dictates what the contents should look like... which elements are valid and in what order, etc. That's why I stress the difference between XML itself, and things which use XML. Most of the time, it's the latter that matters, because XML is only meaningful as a way of representing some structured content. You don't care if something is valid XML - you care that it correctly represent an OpenOffice document, or an SVG image file, or the deployment descriptor for a web application. > I'm also getting the impression from other reading that XHTML (and > perhaps XML?) are now being superseded by HTML5. True or not? They're different things. XHTML was an attempt to create a version of HTML that was also XML - that is, which conformed to the much tighter restrictions on document validity. It never really caught on. HTML5 isn't a replacement for XML... just for HTML4. Simon. -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
