XML : useful links

There are (far too) many sources for XML technologies on the web. Here are a few that I found useful.

Quick reference cards

Tutorials

Specifications

XML (including DTD)
XML-Schema : Primer, Part 1: Structures, Part 2: Datatypes, Regular expressions
Relax NG
XSL (including XSL-FO)
- XPath 1.0 [en français]
- XPath 2.0, XPath Functions, Functions Quick Reference , Regular expressions
  Saxon: Expressions XPath 2.0, Functions
  W3School: XPath Functions
- XSLT 1.0 [en français]
- XSLT 2.0 : Examples
  Saxon: XSLT Elements
XQuery
RDF

DocBook

Validators

Useful tricks

Typical header to XSLT 2.0 stylesheet with appropriate namespaces

<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0"
   xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
   xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
   xmlns:fn="http://www.w3.org/2005/02/xpath-functions"
   xmlns:xdt="http://www.w3.org/2005/02/xpath-datatypes">
   ...
</xsl:stylesheet>

Header for creating an XHTML valid document with XSLT 2.0

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="2.0"
  xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
  xmlns:fn="MyFunctions"
  xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  
  <xsl:output method="xhtml" indent="yes"
      doctype-system="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"
      doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"/>
  
  <xsl:template match="/">
      <html>
          <head>
              <meta http-equiv='content-type' content='text/html;charset=UTF-8'/>
              <title>the title</title>
          </head>
          <body>
              the content of the body in xhtml
          </body>
      </html>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

XSLT instruction to get the file name (without the directory) of the current document
```
<xsl:variable name="fileName" select="replace(document-uri(/),'.*/(.*)','$1')"/>
```

XSLT instruction to get the sequence of all names of all files ending with xml in a given directory

<xsl:variable name="fileNames"
    select="for $f in collection('file:///Absolute/path/to/directory?select=*.xml')
            return document-uri($f)"/>

See this link for more information about dealing with information about files.

As usually a web site does not return a directory structure but a file containing the list of its files, the preceding XSLT instruction will not work with urls starting with http:. Here is a code snippet for parsing the file given at $url and matching each line containing $pattern.

<xsl:variable name="files">
    <xsl:analyze-string select="unparsed-text($url)" regex="\r?\n">
        <xsl:non-matching-substring>
            <xsl:if test="matches(.,$pattern)">
                ... do something with this line ...
            </xsl:if>
        </xsl:non-matching-substring>
    </xsl:analyze-string>
</xsl:variable>