KINOLINA.COM XML Standards and Vocabulary Development Eric Gould December 2002

Case Study: Kinolina.com BENEFITS / REQUIREMENTS CSS / XSL improves on UI design consistency DTD / XML Schema validation enforces page structure conformity Content delivery handled with XML / XSL transformations on the server via ASP increases cross-platform consistency on client browsers KinoML articulates page structure for content and UI design architecture

Case Study: Kinolina.com My project is an XML-generated web site for content delivery, and is a revision of an existing XML project – kinolina.com. Kinolina.com is a self-produced web site used as a vehicle for publishing articles about film and film events. It is also a project to work with XML technologies, including XML Schema validation, DTD validation, and XSL transformations.

Case Study: Kinolina.com The current project is a version 2.0 update of the web site that employs these XML technologies. As a case study, the previous and initial version of the site expressed an XML / XSL delivery of site content. It fell short from a lack of document structure validation, e.g. through the use of a DTD or XML Schema.

Case Study: Kinolina.com Further, CSS and XSL stylesheets produced inconsistent uses of style modeling for the content. Version 2.0 improves upon this by repurposing XML content with fewer XSL stylesheets and adheres to greater UI design consistency. The integration of DTD and XML Schema validation also enforces greater conformity over the site’s document structure.

Case Study: Kinolina.com KinoML – XML VOCABULARY The XML vocabulary I have used in my project is called “KinoML,” named after my web site. KinoML is merely an articulation of the site’s document structure: the presentation and layout of article content. Kinolina.com is an anthology of published article content for dissemination on the web. As such, the site requires consistent formatting for the UI design.

Case Study: Kinolina.com For the page structure and content display, KinoML expresses XML elements like the article’s headline, event name, event date, location and article content. FlixML ( a vocabulary used for film reviews of B movies, provided a model for developing my XML vocabulary. John E. Simpson, the author of FlixML, developed the XML Vocabulary as a project to create a standard for movie reviews. Whereas Simpson’s FlixML DTD specifically organizes his XML content around the elements of his review system, KinoML is pared down to the elements of an article structure for the kinolina web site.

Case Study: Kinolina.com LESSONS LEARNED XML Schema is a good learning tool to perform XML validation, the DTD model works best for defining character entities as well as validation Cross-platform development with server-side XSL transformations is enhanced with ASP scripting, but does not work very well with the addition of DHTML script components used on the Links pages of the site.

Case Study: Kinolina.com FUTURE PLANS Creation of an XML / ASP-based search engine to handle search requests of site content from an XML instance file. Find ways to leverage cross-platform delivery of site content to non-IE client browsers Fine-tune and enhance existing XSL file modeling to improve on page design conformance.