Week 9 - Musings...

Martin Bryan - An Introduction to the Extensible Markup Language (XML)

By far the most helpful article because it made an attempt to start from the very beginning for those whose experience or pre-existing knowledge of XML is limited to non-existent. My only experience working with XML was my class project using EAD in Archival Representation - before that, I had no experience or knowledge of it. Even that introduction to a very specific iteration was not enough. This article 'pulled back' a bit from that very specific application and allowed me to understand more of the context of how XML is utilized in a broader sense outside of archival representation. Further helpful was the concept of how a DTD is created - University of Pittsburgh's Archive Service Center DTD was utilized for our project and the creation of one from scratch was not covered. This article helped fill in some knowledge gaps there.


Uche Ogbuji. - A survey of XML standards - Part 1

This quickly devolved into something I struggled to understand - I attribute this to my struggles to comprehend theoretical technical content that's removed from its practical implementation and context. Were I to see where some of these standards were at work and how they impacted the 'end result' of XML, I might comprehend them a bit better. As it stands in this article, it seems unable to explain them very well without pointing you to a completely new tutorial or article - for me, this bodes poorly for the ease of use of XML and makes it seem much more difficult to use than perhaps was the intention if its creators.


Andre Bergholz - Extending Your Markup


A better article at introducing some XML concepts in a more logical progression and context. The idea of namespaces made a little more sense after reading this article as well. Some of the later concepts still went over my head - were I to be working with them or to have a live demo of how some of these concepts 'work' in a practical context, it might make more sense. I found this to be true working with EAD. I found the article was not very helpful in describing XML schemas - after reading this, I can tell that it's different and supposedly preferable to DTD, but when adjectives like, 'more expressive' are used without really clarifying what that means, I don't find it helpful or explanatory.


w3schools - XML Schema Tutorial

Again, approaching this from an archival description standpoint, it seems that XML schemas would have a great deal of potential for working with and describing digital archival records because of their flexibility in content and data types which can be incorporated. I think I understand some of the reasons that XML schemas are preferable to DTD, but this got a bit more technical and some of the distinctions still weren't entirely clear to me.