XML and ADO.NET Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Correct answer: not-type-valid.

Type validity is conformance to a DTD or schema, so a document with neither cannot be type-valid; the definition makes it not-type-valid regardless of how sensible its content is. It may still be well-formed, which is a weaker and purely syntactic requirement that every XML document must meet.

Answer: B

Correct answer: False

SOAP is transport-independent by design. HTTP is much the commonest carrier, because it passes through firewalls that block other traffic, but a SOAP message can equally be sent over SMTP, over a message queue, or over anything else able to carry text. That independence is exactly what the generalisation from the original protocol achieved.

Answer: A

Correct answer: True

The DTD states which elements may appear, in what order and with what attributes, so it defines the structure of a class of documents. What it does not define is the appearance, which is XSLT’s business - the separation of structure from materialisation being one of the central ideas of XML.

Answer: B

Correct answer: False

A document that does not conform to its DTD is not-type-valid, which is a precise technical status rather than a judgement of quality. It may still be well-formed and perfectly usable for some purposes. The distinction matters because a processor can be asked to validate or merely to parse, and the two give different answers.

Answer: A

Correct answer: True

Each statement is evaluated relative to the node currently matched, so the meaning of an expression depends on where the processor has reached. This is what makes XSLT declarative: the stylesheet says what to produce for each kind of node and leaves the order of traversal to the processor.

Answer: B

Correct answer: False

Display is HTML’s purpose. XML’s value is the separation of structure, content and materialisation, which makes it a vehicle for exchanging structured data between systems that share no software. Rendering a page is one thing that can be done with XML, by way of XSLT, but it is not the main reason it exists.

Answer: A

Correct answer: True

Document processing had structure without query, and database processing had query without structure of the document kind; each solved a problem the other had. It was the volume of semi-structured data moving across the web that made the gap obvious, and XML is the technology that closed it.

Answer: A

Correct answer: True

An XML Schema is itself an XML document, and there is a schema for schemas, so a schema can be validated in exactly the same way as any other document. This is the practical benefit of expressing schemas in XML rather than in a syntax of their own, as DTDs are.

Answer: A

Correct answer: True

XML combines the two traditions: it carries the hierarchical, self-describing structure of a document, and it can be generated from and loaded into a relational database. That double character is why it became the standard for interchange - a document is readable on its own terms and a database can still get at what is inside it.

Answer: A

Correct answer: True

XSLT is the standard means of materialising XML: a stylesheet of match-and-action rules transforms the source into HTML for a browser, into another XML vocabulary for a different system, or into plain text. The transformation is declarative, and the same content can be materialised many ways by supplying different stylesheets.