Week 9 Readings

Wow, all the readings this week are really way over my head.  I’m hoping that some of this stuff becomes understandable once I start applying it to creating my Web page, but for now, I have to say that I really don’t follow much of it at all, and the readings only confounded me rather than made any of it clearer.  There’s some hope for the w3schools XML Schema Tutorial, but I can’t really grasp this stuff without actually doing it (why didn’t they have a “Try It Yourself” option, I wonder?).  Ooh, this is all starting to worry me.  I’m not a programmer, by any means.  And this is looking a LOT like programming.

In short:

I have a feeling I didn't read the right Bryan article. . . . The BURKS document I read (from the link in CourseWeb) left me thinking, "Well, it was nice while it lasted," but I guess it just wasn’t relevant anymore, being nine years out of date, and with new versions of software and cheap Internet access.  I guess it shows what some were willing to do for those who did not have computing references and resources readily available to them.

The Survey of XML Standards, Part 1, briefly explains what the author defines as the most important core XML standards (and the organizations involved that set those standards).  Ogbuji explains that XML is based on SGML, that it is simpler than SGML (HA!), and that it is better suited to the Web environment.  The remainder of the article explains different systems, data sets, data models, and languages that all can be used to affect the structure of a document.  He provides useful references and resources throughout. 

“Extending Your Markup” began, for me, as a very promising informative tutorial on XML language.  In the first section alone, I learned three main points:

•    SGML lets you define structure for documents
•    HTML is primarily used for layout on the Web
•    XML (Extensible Markup Language) lets you annotate text

(Those bullet points are from the first page of Bergholz’s article.)  First of all, I never knew what the “X” stood for in XML.  The examples in Figures 1a and 1b were helpful, in that 1b was clearly easier to read and understand.  But I’m afraid after that, the author lost me. 

I’m sure I will come to rely on the w3schools “XML Schema Tutorial.”  I was thinking “Why do I have to know this stuff” until I read the following in one of the chapters, “Even if documents are well-formed they can still contain errors, and those errors can have serious consequences.  Think of the following situation: you order 5 gross of laser printers, instead of 5 laser printers. With XML Schemas, most of these errors can be caught by your validating software.”  Hmmm.  Okay.  That's pretty impressive.  I guess I can see why I might want to know this stuff. . . .