XML and me, Could it be love?
OK, now I am seeing why there has been so much emphasis on keeping tags well nested and giving tags closing tags and the requirement of quotes on attributes as I was learning updated html. This stuff didn't seem as important back in my BBEdit4.0 early days of coding by hand. But with the rise of CSS and XML these things are now ironclad laws. In fact my boredom with html over the past 16 years just might give way to a budding new interest.My wife loves to make analogies between anything she's talking about and dating, i.e. how looking for jobs is like dating, how choosing classes for next semester is like dating. I'd like to give my own analogy: me acquiring new software languages and dating. Html was like a high school affair: learning all the ins and outs what you should and shouldn't do, but carefree and consequence free. Linux/ssh has been like a college relationship, dark, cold, unresponsive and requiring that already I know the rules of the game really well or knowing all the commands already if you expect to get anywhere. Yeah, that relationship went nowhere. But I've heard so many good things about XML for so long, that XML could handle all my data sorting needs, that XML has extensible tags that are human readable! It's like that early stage of a crush when you can't stop listening to Hard Day's Night-era love songs over and over again. I think when the reading mentioned that XML has lots of uses for librarians I woke up and took notice.
I'm also realizing that a few humorous things in blogs that I thought were mock-html just may have been actual XML and that what I was calling "pseudo-html" in terms of the markup for writing a Wikipedia entry might very well be XML.
Before I began taking DigIn or SIRLS classes, I had built up a colossal file of reference images and wanted to develop a systematic means of attributing data to these images, so XML might be the way to go with that, i.e. it could be a good school project in a nice sandbox environment and beneficial to my outside interest to create this for that database.
So, I watched the Mark Long videos, that guy is a cut up. I guess after that, James Pasley, the guy with a thick Irish brogue was not as helpful. The words from the W3 Consortium were a good distillation of the Mark Long videos, but it helped to watch the videos before reviewing the W3C's notes. THe best note "XML doesn't DO anything!"
I realize that XML must run in browsers and not in any specific XML application. I'm also thinking that last week's question about web applications might have led me to wonder how those servers query their databases and I am now assuming that it with XML. I am also curious about XSL and XSLT and how they are used.
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