GBdirect XML Training Courses

The World Wide Web has made previously unimaginable quantities and varieties of data available to those with access to it.

At the same time, the frustration which many web users experience in accessing useful data points to some fundamental weaknesses in the ways we currently store, describe and exchange that data; most notably, its storage in mutually incompatible proprietary formats and its presentation in forms which bind the data inextricably to its visual presentation (e.g., in HTML both the tag semantics and the tag set associated with blocks of data are locked into particular companies' browsers).

Because the content of data has been inseparable from its storage medium and visual presentation, the shift to more dynamic and interactive web content has, paradoxically, made it harder for many users to extract the information they want from the world's databases. In so doing, it has also made the conceptually simple task of maintaining or upgrading web sites into an administrator's nightmare.

The World-Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) eXtensible Markup Language (XML) enables us to create documents and databases whose contents are self-describing, i.e., the distinct items of data within such databases can be individually recognised and separately extracted from the medium in which they are typically stored and presented.

Our XML training courses provide both a strategic overview of XML (its structure and its applications in business) and a technical introduction to its application.

The primary focus of all our XML training courses is the practical implementation of XML in real businesses, drawing on our experience implementing XML-based solutions on complex, high-traffic, e-commerce style web sites, e.g., content syndication for The Register.