Figure 6-7. Overriding the default border color

It's in the borders, incidentally, where you can have an effecton the foreground color of images. Since images are already composedof colors, you can't really affect them usingcolor, but you can change the color of any border

The 2nd category of Java applications called Java Application Servers (or app servers) and they make good use of XML. Unlike client side graphical Java apps (from the previous section) which are very standalone in their operations, app servers tie many different networked software components together in order to provide information from multiple sources to a set of client side Java apps or web browsers (maybe even running on different devices). This is shown in Figure 2. An app server is actually a conglomeration of several distributed and client/server software systems. So when you write an app server, you are actually writing many different software systems which are all networked to work together, to process information that comes from various sources, and distribute this information to a set of client apps (that you also have to write) running on different devices and platforms.

How can XML help app servers do their work? As you can see in Figure 2, in order for the app server to harvest information from such a rich variety of sources, there must be some common ground between all of these sources (each of which might be running on a different hardware and software system). This common ground is the information which flows throughout the entire system, regardless of what source the information comes from. CORBA is an example of tying disparate systems together based on the interfaces that certain remote objects implement. XML does the same thing for data. It allows these disparate systems to share information in a medium that consists only of pure information (and the structural relationships that exist inside of that information). By taking the lowest common denominator approach by using plain text to encode data, XML allows these systems to talk with each other without requiring any special binary information format converters or other service layers to translate between binary formats (for encoding data). Also, since HTTP already supports transmission of plain text, it is completely natural to move XML around using the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol through firewalls and disparate networks. This is shown in Figure 3. XML can be transmitted between systems using one of the most prevalent protocols in use today, Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP 1.1 (which is the protocol of the web).

In addition, even though they don't explicitly say so, the examples in this section (and the next few sections) are all based

BLOCKQUOTE {font-style: italic;}BLOCKQUOTE EM, BLOCKQUOTE I {font-style: normal;}

Figure 5-28. Common typographical conventions through CSS