XML Processing and Programming

Dengping Zhu and Hongwei Xi

XML is a semi-structured data model for describing static documents and data. Besides providing the extensibility of SGML, XML also retains the syntactical simplicity of HTML.It is expected to replace HTML as the next generation of markup language of the World Wide Web within the next few years. In addition, XML is not just for web pages, it can be used to store any kind of structured information, and to enclose information in order to exchange it between different computing systems which would otherwise be unable to communicate.
Static type checking and polymorphism for XML processing functions have been two challenging problems since the advent of XML. Both of them depends on the internal representation of a document. Currently, most representations used in practice are untyped in the sense that the type of an XML document is lost in its representation. We are trying to find a typed representation for XML documents and build languages such as XQuery and XSLT based on our representation.


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