XML stands for the eXtensible Markup Language develo ped by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). The W3C is the organization in charge of the development and maintenance of most Web standards, like HTML for instance.

XML was designed to describe data and to focus on what data is. HTML on the other hand was designed to display data and to focus on how data looks. The tags used to mark up HTML documents and the structure of HTML documents are predefined. XML allows the author to define his own tags and his own document structure. With XML, data can be exchanged between incompatible systems. In the real world, computer systems and databases contain data in incompatible formats. One of the most time-consuming challenges for developers has been to exchange data between such systems over the Internet. Converting the data to XML can greatly reduce this complexity and create data that can be read by many different types of applications. Since XML data is stored in plain text format, XML provides a software- and hardware- independent way of sharing data. XML can also be used to store data in files or in databases. Applications can be written to store and retrieve information from the store, and generic applications can be used to display the data.

The main goal of this work was to devise a set of exercises for a XML course at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences Winterthur (ZHW). The exercises cover the following topics:

• Well-formed and valid XML
• DTD's and XML-Schema
• XML Namespaces
• XML Parsers DOM and SAX
• Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
• Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL)