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...of XML (or HTML) documents means to collect the content of several XML files in one XML (or HTML) document (see Figure 1).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

A portal product, for example, would aggregate the content of several data sources into one HTML page and present their contents in boxes in the user's browser. Most portals do this with programs written in lava, Perl, or some other programming language; however, XSLT includes the function document(), which is suitable for this purpose.

XMLSPY is a high-level XML editing tool, offering many visual capabilities for creating, changing, formatting, and presenting XML documents. The following example shows how XMLSPY's features can be used for aggregation.

XMLSPY Features

XMLSPY uses the following file name extensions:

* .xml: XML data

* .xsd: XML Schema Definition

* .xsl: Extensible Stylesheet Language

* .xslt: XSL Transformations

* .sps: Stylesheet Designer's internal format

An .xml document contains the data. XMLSPY can check (with the function key F7) if it is well formed, i.e., if it satisfies XML's syntax. With its data structure defined in an XSD document, XMLSPY can check (with F8) if it is valid (if it uses only the structures defined in the schema). The reference to XSD can be written into the XML document.

XMLSPY can automatically generate XSD for an existing XML document; however, it must be reviewed because it might contain undesired constraints.

An XSL document usually contains formatting information for XML data. It can be visually developed with Stylesheet Designer for an existing XSD document, and formatting can be assigned to every structure element contained there. The result can be viewed in HTML preview if a working XML file (with data) has been assigned. Stylesheet Designer stores the result in its internal .sps format (a special XML...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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