Tutorial: Introduction to XML

Abstract

Using XML for electronic publishing has a lot of advantages, as the format is vendor independent, readeable on any soft- or hardware platform and most suiteable for long term preservation. Unfortunately XML is always a question of the Document Type Definition used for defining the structure of a class of documents and the support for potential authors. This tutorial will give general introduction into XML, XML processing and XSLT as well as demonstrate some useful tools. Within this tutorial we will work with the DiML, the Dissertation Markup Language DTD developed at Humboldt-University and show different strategies to convert dissertations written in Microsoft Word into XML. We we also introduce Staroffice/Openoffice as a good tool for students to write their dissertation directly in an XML based editor.