Learning:
The Journey of a Lifetime
A Cloud Chamber of the Mind

April 2006 Technology Notebook

Notes based on the W3C tutorial web pages for XML.

I have spent the last two mornings creating a very simple XML file (on Australian birds) that currently contains one record and a very simple XSL file using Stylus Studio, which although it works fails to do any real formatting of the data.

I now want to add a few records to the data file (say about 5) and then focus on improving the stylesheet so that it provides a more sophisticated display of the data. Adding records to the data should present no difficulties as I can use the grid tab layout to do this without any effort. However the stylesheet improvements will be more difficult as I am not yet familiar with most of the options or possibilities.

I began by referring to my Ausbirds HTML file that I have been creating in Dreamweaver.

The first difficulty was with the first record. Instead of one link for this record, I had eight. I finessed this by toggling back to the text view and added a second link tag. Then when I returned to the grid view I had a modified layout that easily allowed me to continue to add the links.

The second difficulty was after I added the second record. At this point I decided to validate my file. To my surprise I had a number of errors. My schema file was set up to expect only one entry for the links instead of an optional number.

This is turning into a bit of a nightmare. I tried recreating the schema file from the modified data thinking that this would solve the problem. However I still received a couple of validation errors. While retrying this I suddenly received an error message from Stylus Studio and I lost all of my work.

I still have my original XML data file with one record. I will try adding a couple of additional links to the first record (again) and then add a second record (with two links) and then try creating a schema file.

Nope. It crashed again. I have sent an error report to Stylus Studio.

I will restart Stylus Studio from scratch and see if I can see what is happening.

7:30 am I seem to have this working now, but I am not totally sure what the original problem was, nor what I did to correct it.

Using the Tree view I was able to delete the associated schema files and then recreate them from a revised XML data file that had both more than one record and that had a variable number of links elements.

I am now going to try creating another couple of records and test the file for well-formedness and validity.

8:10 am I am getting the hang of this now. I have 5 records with a variety of number of links. To add the variety of links I add a nested table.

I now have an XML data file with 5 records as well as an associated schema. The data is both well-formed and valid. Excellent.

The next task is to accomplish something genuine with a stylesheet. This took almost three hours but I worked my way through the problems and learned a couple of new techniques about inputting data into an XML file.