Reading Notes- Week 9

1) Martin Bryan.  Introducing the Extensible Markup Language (XML) http://burks.bton.ac.uk/burks/internet/web/xmlintro.htm

I am not sure if there is something wrong with this link. There is nothing about XML on the page that the link redirects me too. For now, I will skip this article. Are others having similar problems?


EDIT: Devon and Katie both found links to this article. Apparently I'm not as good at sleuthing around for these articles as I thought. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bult.104/full


I liked the layout of this article, and I wish I had read it before the others. This article was very informative about XML. I found it interesting, (as well as logical) that there probably will never be a standard coding system that is suitable for all uses.

2) Uche Ogbuji. A survey of XML standards: Part 1. January 2004. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-stand1.html

I found this article very technical and found it hard to grasp some of the information presented. XML is based on Standard Generalized Markup Language. This article discussed different aspects of XML that are standards.

3) Extending your Markup: a XML tutorial by Andre Bergholz PDF

I had trouble opening the PDF. I found the article somewhere else if anyone else was having trouble: http://pdffinder.com/get/extending-your-markup-an-xml-tutorial.pdf

After reading the daunting Ogbuji article, I felt better reading the introduction to Bergholz’s article. Bergholz states that XML allows for annotation. XML is both easier for humans and computers to read. I found this article to describe the standards in a much simpler way than the previous article. Putting the explanations of XPointer, XPath, and Xlink together made them much easier to understand as they are used for a similar function, which is linking. These supporting languages allow for a better means of linking than HTML is capable of.

4) XML Schema Tutorial http://www.w3schools.com/Schema/default.asp

I like the w3school’s tutorials because of the visual examples where you actually get to see the coding of XML as we did with HTML. This article explains XML schema. It explains that XML schema describes the different elements of the XML file. Simple elements are made up of only text, while more complex elements can have attributes. I am interested in learning more about XML. I can see this language as a valid alternative to HTML.