Course

XML Foundations

A free, interactive XML course for people who need the vocabulary before the query language. Every lesson gives you a real document to edit: you break well-formedness and fix it, add a namespace and watch what changes, escape a character that would otherwise end the document.

Lessons

Two phases. The first covers document structure; the second covers the prolog, namespaces, and the tree model that XPath then queries.

  • Elements & Structure: Elements
  • Elements & Structure: Tree Relationships
  • Elements & Structure: Attributes
  • Elements & Structure: Well-formed XML
  • Elements & Structure: Empty Elements
  • Elements & Structure: Comments
  • Elements & Structure: Character Escapes
  • Elements & Structure: CDATA Sections
  • Prolog & Namespaces: XML Declaration
  • Prolog & Namespaces: Processing Instructions
  • Prolog & Namespaces: Namespaces I: prefixes
  • Prolog & Namespaces: Namespaces II: default namespaces
  • Prolog & Namespaces: The DOM: a name for the tree
  • Prolog & Namespaces: Bridge to XPath

What it does not cover

Schemas (DTD, XSD, RELAX NG), XSLT, and XQuery are out of scope for this course. The final lesson bridges into XPath, which is the natural next step.

The XPath course · XPath reference