XML courses – which course for who?

XML is not a piece of software, it is a Markup Language. There is no front-runner in the available development platforms, and it is such a wide area that probably no one piece of software will do the whole job.

This document describes who would benefit from each of the three courses.

XML Introduction

This is a basic introduction to what XML is, and what is possible using XML. It is the course most (if not all) people will need to do first, except those who already know how to structure XML.

There are no pre-requisites, but any of the following would be useful:

• An idea of how XML might be used within their organisation will help delegates to ground the ideas presented on the course in practical applications (General example applications are discussed on the course).
• Some exposure to web page coding (HTML/CSS) or SGML. This does not need to be in-depth, but will help delegates to appreciate why XML is useful and how much more powerful it is than HTML and more straightforward than SGML.
• Some involvement with databases will help them see how XML can give wider access to all kinds of data, so long as it is structured as XML.

None of the above are required to get the most from the introduction.

Some examples of people who would benefit from this course:

• Strategists who need to know what XML can do for their business, and why everyone is talking about XML.
• Content creators (web, print, or other publishers) who have to move their content to XML structures and need to know why and how.
• IT people who need to get a grip on why Microsoft Office is going to be entirely XML-based, and what advantages this will bring (MS Office 2000 and XP already implement a lot of XML)

After attending this course delegates will have a good grounding in the major XML concepts, including an idea of what XML transformations and XML Schema can do. The next two courses fill in the detail about these two concepts. Not everyone will need both the following courses and some will not need either.

XML Document Design using XML Schema

This course requires all the basic concepts from the XML Introduction course. Someone attending this course without equivalent experience will be quickly out of their depth. However, no knowledge of XML Transformations is required.

Some examples of people who would benefit from this course:

• Someone with the task of implementing XML Schema rather than DTDs to validate their XML
• Anyone who needs to understand the benefits of XML Schema compared to DTDs (before committing to a particular solution)
• People who will maintain, manage or update an existing XML solution which uses XML Schema

XML Transformations Overview

This course requires all the concepts from the XML introduction, so delegates either need to have attended that course or have equivalent experience. Someone with scant knowledge of XML would find this course confusing and would not get much benefit from it.

Although the course begins with a review of XML and DTDs, this is done in the context of XML Transformations and is no replacement for experience at the level of the Introduction to XML.

If an organisation has decided to use XML Schema in their XML solution, then the XML Schema course would be an essential pre-requisite for this course. However, the course works just as well if they are using DTDs, which are introduced in the XML Introduction course.

Some examples of people who would benefit from this course:

• Those involved in preparing data for presentation on multiple platforms (such as web, print, multimedia devices, PDAs)
• People being offered Web Services (or other data sets) in XML, which must then be presented in a more familiar format (such as MS Office documents or web pages)
• Anyone responsible for creating templates for others to use in the flow of XML data within an organisation

There is a great amount of logical reasoning required to fulfil the exercises on this course, so even though it is often the role of a designer to make data presentable, delegates must appreciate XML Transformations are more like programming than a design tool. However, XML and XML Transformations are not actually programming languages (XML is a Mark-up Language).

The Whole Suit of courses

Some people will benefit from attending all three courses. For example

• Publishers wishing to provide content to a wider range of devices than just web browsers (e.g. for CD, print, Digital TV, WAP, Web Services and Web Pages)
• Data administrators being asked to give ever wider access to ever more un-structured data (e.g. Word and Excel documents stored across a network)
• Evaluators who need to get an overview of the main techniques and technologies involved in XML

Setup Requirements

The minimum requirements are:

• A text editor
• Internet Explorer 6 (5.5 will not do) or Firefox
• Access to the internet

However, to give users experience of XML development environments (rather than good old Notepad), it is good to also have:

• Eclipse set up for XML or
• Dreamweaver

Also, to show XML working with a web server, it is handy to have a web server on each machine, such as Apache or IIS.

Delegates may hear of MS Visual Studio.NET which ‘does XML’. This is fine, but beyond the scope of these courses. There are also other advanced XML technologies which are not covered in these courses.