Exercise 11

1. Conduct research on the Internet to find out what tools can be used to parse an XML document and ensure that the document is well formed and valid.

Parser is an essential tool for reading and modifying XML document. The term ‘parser’ is sometimes interchangeable with 'processor'. Any program that input an XML file and produces the output based on the XML files content is an XML processor. An XML browser is a kind of processor. A parser is software that performs the first step in the processing of an XML document. Parser is almost always used as part of an XML processor. The foundation task of a parser is checking the XML document for well-formed data, and make sure the documents content follows the rules of XML syntax. Most of the parsers can check the document for validity by checking against Document Type Definition (DTD) or Schema. The final task of the parser may perform to make the content of the document, both marks-up and data, available to the processing software. SAX (Simple API for XML) API or Document Object Model (DOM) API does this (Devshed, 2009).

The following are some popular parsers for validating XML documents to be well formed:
• Altova XMLspy (Altova, 2008);
• MSXML - Microsoft XML Core Services (Microsoft Corporation, 2008);
• Expat (Clark, 1999).


2. What are the benefits of adopting a schema standardized for a business sector?

The benefits of adopting schema standards for a business sector are summarized below (Sugamata, 2004):

• to facilitate sharing of information between business;
• to ensure interoperability between corporate systems;
• to improve efficiency in onsite production, core distribution and operation;
• to established a sophistically level of computerization in product traceability and recycle fields;
• to form a seamless information sharing platform.


3. SMIL is an application of XML. What is the purpose of this technology? Where does it apply?

SMIL is Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language and SMIL documents are XML 1.0 documents. Purposes of SMIL are to enable the integration sets of independent multimedia objects into a synchronized multimedia presentation. Functions of SMIL can be summarized as follows (Hoschka, 1998):

• to detail the temporal behaviour of the presentation;
• to detail the layout of presentation’s screen;
• to embed hyperlinks into various media objects.


Providing captions enables media that contains spoken or other audio information (on-or off-screen sound effects, or background music) important to understanding the media’s content to be accessible to anyone who has difficulty hearing, or is unable to hear, the media soundtrack. SMIL is an open standard created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - and therefore in theory media player or format-independent - for creating accessible media through combining caption and audio description files with media files and providing information on their synchronisation and display. General Principles

SMIL is based on Extensible Markup Language (XML). Version 1.0 has been around since 1998; the specification for version 2.0 was published at the beginning of 2005. A SMIL file is a simple text file, so like HTML; it can be created using a basic text editor. In practice, though, they are created more effectively and quickly using authoring software like MAGpie.