Week 9 Reading Notes:

Week 9 Reading Notes:

Brighton University Resource Kit for Students:

A little anecdote while I wait for the ISO to download: there was a postgraduate pub at the UK university where I did my MSc. It sounds a little snobbish, but a graduate-and-faculty-only pub was a wonderful place to wind down and casually discuss your research. (It never hurts to get second opinions from people working in other areas.) BURKS came up one night while a group of us were discussing various bits of humanistic research, from our involvement in Iraq Body Count Project to studying the roots of inequality in the Caribbean islands. The conversation generally turned to international inequality and then to the idea that information could be the ‘great democratizer.’ Predictably, the global variance present in Internet access came up, and an electro-acoustic music composition PhD candidate I knew brought up BURKS. I’m glad to see that at least one night at the pub has validated itself! I can’t wait to look through it once it finishes downloading (in two hours…).

Survey of XML standards Part 1:

I was immediately struck by the fact that the second English specification of XML is the one that is intended to standardize extensible markup language. I guess it makes sense—I mean French was the language of politics before English took over. There is always a preferred language for a certain field. That said, I wonder whether or not the democratizing potential of Internet technologies justify the use of some kind of auxiliary language, maybe Experanto? It seems that the use of such a language would automatically put everyone on the same page, as very few countries actually utilize Esperanto as a national language…

 I also enjoyed reading that XML is a simplification of SGML. We’ve learned about XML in a few other classes (though this is one of the better explanations of it that I’ve seen), but no one has previously come right out and said that XML is an attempt to streamline or simplify SGML, the parent of HTML. Coming from the field of psychology, where basic analyses of variance (ANOVAs) and analyses of covariance (ANCOVAs) have given way to more complex statistical methodologies like factor analysis and the exponentially more complex structured equation modeling (SEM), I think it’s nice to see progress come in the form of simplification. That said, the more I read, the less it seems that XML is really a simplification. Maybe that’s just because any set of drastic changes made to a standardized procedure already in place necessitates the clarification of every little change, every new nuance?

After reading through this, (and admittedly, I didn’t really attempt what you might call a close textual analysis, haha) I’m not entirely sure that I’m clear on the distinction between XML and XHTML. Can anyone shed some light on this?

Extending your Markup:

I found the examples provided in this tutorial to be very helpful. Learning by example is always easier for me (maybe I’m a visual thinker, or just a little thick--- probably a combination of the two). In any case, the inclusion of the Examples found in the orange boxes was much appreciated.

XML Schema Tutorial:

Like the HTML tutorial by W3 that we saw last week, this site functioned a little like a cup of IT chamomile tea. I definitely bookmarked it, as I’m sure it will come in handy down the line.