Learning: The Journey of a Lifetime

Journals as an Aid to Learning

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An Example of a "Learning Process" Journal (using the 2 colored box format)
 
March 16, 2004

  • Cascading Style Sheets: The Designer's Edge (2004) by Molly Holzschlag
  • Learn XML in a Weekend (2002) by Erik Westermann
  • Teach Yourself XML in 21 days (2003) by Steven Holzner.

10:10 am

I have been playing with all three books, plus the software program XMLSPY, in a firly unordered fashion this morning. It does help build my intuition, but there is also a place for more rigorous learning.

What am I trying to learn?

1) XML, for creating data files (hopefully my online courses)

2) CSS, for displaying data files on the web

3) using XMLSPY to create XML files

One of my dilemmas at the moment is wondering how much theory of XML do I need to know to use XMLSPY and how much do I need to know to convert my courses to XML and CSS.

Key points so far:

  • XML is for storing data
  • CSS are used to desplay XML files
  • An XML file begins with an XML declaration statement:
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    This specifies the version of XML being used as well as the encoding standard.
  • Next comes a DTD (Document Type Definition) statement:
    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
    A DTD can be very complex. The above example looks like it should be used whenever I have a page that I want to view on the Web. This says, among other things, that I will be following the XHTML standard (which is much like HTML except that it conforms to the XML standard for tags).
  • If I want to create a simple data base, then I focus on XML.
  • If I want to convert to XHTML then I need to know a bit about CSS files.

Chapter 7 of the CSS book talks about reconstructing a Table-Based Site. I will see if I can handle this with my limited knowledge. Let's see if I can redo the amportal code.


12:20 PM I have "deconstructed" my amportal web page and have it displaying with a browser.

I ran into difficulties with the DTD as well as with the namespace. The first four lines should be:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
" http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
< html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

I have a broken link for the coffee image (which is likely due to the image not being in the same folder)
  • First, I copied the source code from the amportal web page into the XMLSPY software.
  • Then I copied the DTD and pasted it in immediately following the XML declaration statement.
  • The book then says to remove all the font elements.
  • I followed the hints from XLMSPY to delete a number of elements related to tables.

Reminder: each "Learning" session has a new web page.

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