c# print barcode CLIENT-SIDE XML in Font

Encoder Data Matrix in Font CLIENT-SIDE XML

Figure 4-3. Working with XML content in Flash Now that you understand the ways in which you can work with XML on the client, it s time to look at XML support in the most common web browsers.

XML support can include the display of raw XML and conformity with The W3C DOM XML Schema Definition (XSD) Language XSLT Before discussing browser support, let s have a quick refresher about these concepts and look at some pertinent points.

A DOM represents a document as a series of related objects. The HTML DOM provides an application programming interface (API) for addressing parts of a web document. If you ve worked with JavaScript, you may have used the HTML DOM to access specific elements within an XHTML document. For example, you can find the title of an XHTML document with document.title or count the number of images on a page using document.images.length. If you ve created DHTML, you ve addressed the issue of browser incompatibility. The W3C has released a recommendation that provides for three different levels of DOM support, numbered 1 to 3, respectively. The higher the DOM level, the larger the feature set that is supported. The W3C refers to the early Netscape Navigator 3 and Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 3 DOMs as Level 0. You can find out more at http://www.w3.org/DOM/. DOM is also separated into different sections: Core, XML, and HTML. The HTML DOM extends some of the Core functionality. Because it extends this functionality, it s compatible with earlier DOM implementations.

The W3C DOM treats data as a tree of nodes, where each node has properties and methods. While DOM theoretically has a wider scope than XML documents, most of the implementations have been concerned with XML and XHTML. The recommendation is platform- and programming-language-independent. This means that, once you ve learned one implementation, you ll be able to apply the same constructs with different languages. Rather than go into detail in this short section, I ll examine DOM scripting fully in 8. In that chapter, I ll use JavaScript to manipulate DOM, and you ll work through several examples.

Schemas specify the rules for creating valid documents within a given XML vocabulary. XML schemas are one class of schema developed by the W3C. XML schemas address some of the shortcomings in Document Type Definitions (DTDs). One area addressed is the ability of the XML schema language to define complex relationships and data types within an XML document.

XSLT is an XML vocabulary that is concerned with transforming one XML document tree into another. I ll look at this topic in more detail in s 6 and 7. The sections that follow will look at XML support in these major web browsers: Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Netscape 8 Opera 8.5 These are the current browser versions at the time of writing. I ll cover the display of raw XML in each browser and the XML parser used by each browser, and I ll show you how the browser determines XML content. I ll also look at any XML functionality specific to the browser. Note that the forthcoming release of Opera 9 includes support for XSLT, which isn t present in the current version.

Microsoft included XML support in early releases of the IE browser with MSXML, formerly known as the Microsoft XML Parser. MSXML is available as a DLL, in different versions.

Internet Explorer has included MSXML since version 4 of the browser. The parser provides a fairly complete implementation of most of the major W3C XML standards. In general, the more recent versions of IE provide better compliance with standards.