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

• Teach Yourself XML in 21 days (2003) by Steven Holzner: Day 9

5:50 am

I did a preliminary read of chapters 9 and 10 yesterday. Now to capture some of the yellow highlighting. I also printed out the online tutorial for Stylevision. I will begin to follow that as soon as I finish the notes.

• Teach Yourself XML in 21 days (2003) by Steven Holzner: Day 9
  
• One may use CSS to format XML documents.
• "However, there's a native XML way to format XML documents for display - using Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT)." [p. 285]
• "XSLT has become the most popular part of XSL because it's relatively easy to use." [p. 286]
• "XSLT is a specification of the W3C" [p. 286]
• "You can use XSLT to transform XML into any text-based format, such as HTML, plain text, rich text format (RTF), and Microsoft Word. ... To transform XML by using XSLT, you need two documents - an XML document you want to transform and an XSLT style sheet." [p. 286]
• One may also use XSLT to extract data from an XML file. [p. 287]
• "Internet Explorer (but not, unfortunately, Netscape Navigator), lets you perform XSLT 1.0 transformations." [p. 290]
• "In XSLT terms, an XML document is a tree of nodes." [p. 293]
• "Each distinct item in an XML document is considered a node - comments, processing instructions, elements, even the text inside elements." [p. 293]
• "From XSLT's point of view, there are seven types of nodes ... :
  • Attribute
  • Comment
  • Element
  • Namespace (the URI)
  • Processing instruction (excluding the ?s)
  • Root node
  • Text" [p. 293]
• "To indicate what elements you want to locate and work with, you use the <xsl:template> element to create an XSL template. A template lets you match a node or nodes in the XML document and specify what you want to do with the contained data. [p. 294]

• XSLT - even the acronyms are complex.
• I seem to recall reading somewhere (likely the Stylevision tutorial) that I can also use XSLT to transform an XML document into an Adobe pdf document. Amazing!
• I need to see the <xsl:template> element in opertion in Stylevision by specifying a node and then viewing the code. Done. This is where I try to take advantage of the Stylevision software and thus ignore the actual code. But I think it is important to have a general sense of what is going on behind the scenes.
• Comparing my old amportal page with the one I am trying to create using XML, I notice that I would like to have a blank line with the background color at the very top of the page, plus I would like to center the heading. At the moment I am not sure how to do this.
• The remainder of the chapter is about coding detail. I will begin by ignoring this and see what happens.

• Teach Yourself XML in 21 days (2003) by Steven Holzner: Day 10
  
• This chapter is about XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects)
• "XSL-FO, which is far more involved than XSLT, lets you format data down to the last little detail." [p. 331]
• "XSL is not in as widespread use as XSLT." [p. 331]

• XSL-FO is part of Stylevision. This includes the use of 'Blocks'.
• Once again, I will omit this chapter, and focus on learning to use this feature in Stylevision.
• This ends part II of the Holzner book [p. 380]. The next section of the book is about XHTML, which may be what I really want, but I think I will hold off on that for a bit and start looking at the Stylevision tutorial.
• Basically I am trying to balance two books on XML, one book on CSS and two new software packages (XMLspy and Stylevision) into one efficient leaning sequence. I try to keep moving forward until I am in over my head, then I backtrack and see what I need to learn to move forward. I am halfway through the Holzner book on XML and have read most of the other two books. I still need to obtain mastery of the software and will undoubtedly need to pick up more conceptual ideas that underly what the software is allowing me to do.

6:50 am

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