For many of us, XML has become a ubiquitous presence in application development, whether parsing, validating, or manipulating it. For many of us, all that XML is coupled with pain, in the form of tedious APIs (like, say, the W3C DOM API) and confusing technologies (oh, I don't know, W3C XML Schema?).

In this session, I share the following tips for making the XML in our lives a little easier to deal with: - Use StAX instead of SAX - Use StAX to create XML - Use JDOM instead of W3C DOM - Use XPath to select XML - Use Jaxen to enable XPath over custom trees - Use RELAX NG instead of DTD or WXS - Use Trang when DTD/WXS output is required - Use Sun's RELAX NG Converter when WXS input is required - Consider RELAX NG's compact syntax - Use Schematron to extend schema languages - Consider XML namespaces for versioning - Ignore unknown namespaces