Week Five Readings~ XML to the max...

I found reading about XML to be both interesting and intense. Each reading and the tutorial covered aspects of XML, with points overlapping. I don't know how many times I have to read about XML, but I think it will always be a bit of daunting task for me!

Martin Bryan. Introducing the Extensible Markup Language (XML)

This reading was a introduction to XML and aspects of XML. I think this article did a very good job of giving a basic and understandable definition, "XML is a subset of SGML and allows users to check validity of every element" and "XML provides a formal syntex for describing the relationship between entities, elements and attributes that make up an XML document".
Obviously, the reading goes into much further detail including talking about XML components, attributes, and how XML is used.
I found this article to be a great introduction into the world of XML, however, as I mentioned earlier XML is just a tough subject for me to get through, no matter how clearly it is written.

A few thoughts this reading raised for me were questions about how/why don't empty elements need an end tag? For the sake of consistency, shouldn't the standard be to include an end tag even if it is empty?

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

This article was in-depth with extensive detail. It explains in great detail, the standards of XML. The reading covers XML 1.0, XML 1.1, catalogs, XML namespaces, XML base, XML inclusions, XML info set and etc.
The incredible about of information this article covered was a bit overwhelming. However, I did find it useful that the author made a point to explain the "flavors of standards". Again though, reading about XML standards is up there with reading about XML and it's functions for me, hard to get through and synthesize!

XML Schema Tutorial

I happen to really enjoy and learn a lot of tutorials. I think it is a great way to learn something new as well as having something to reference back to if you get stuck. Basically this tutorial is showing the user how to "read and create XML Schemas, why XML Schemas are more powerful than DTDs, and how to use the XML Schema language in your application"

I found this tutorial to be a very practical tool in showing me how to create XML schemas, something I only have a bit of experience with. Obviously, this tutorial is a valuable resource for an information science student.


Overall, each of these readings (and the tutorial) were very useful,although, I think that it is going to take me a few more reads to process all of the information and understand XML and have a working knowledge of it.