1. Advanced Technical Writing 2006 Session #4

2. Today in Class… ► Meet with your editorial team, refine/post deliverables ► Send URL for deliverables to Bill to post on class page ► Brief intro to XML

3. A brief introduction to XML As customized as necessary & As generalized as possible

4. What is XML ► eXtensible Markup Language (much cooler than eML, eh?) ► Think of it as a generic way to describe markup languages…allowing users to create their own tags which describe what is sometimes called the “semantic structure” of a document

5. What is XML ► Still confused? XML is a subset of SGML, the publishing industry standard for describing content so that it can be stored, referenced, distributed, and presented consistently across diverse systems

6. This is XML* <citation> Hart-Davidson, William Hart-Davidson, William <date>2000</date><publisher> Drybooks Inc. Drybooks Inc. <pcity>Antwerp</pcity></publisher></citation> * Well formed, but not valid XML… This could be finer grained..

7. What does XML do? 1 XML allows you to define the pieces of information (or objects, as we came to know them this week) that make up a document in such a way as to allow both humans and machines to recognize them and act upon them

8. What does XML do? 2 For machines, XML defines the logical structure of the document, giving names to things so they can be recognized (parsed) or referenced in conditional statements, etc …for people, it provides a way to describe what I’d rather call the rhetorical structure of the document

9. How does XML work? xml Dtd style rules An xml document is made valid when a Document Type Definition (or Schema) is present that describes types of elements and the relationships among elements for the document

10. An XML scenario, 1 Bill downloads a DTD that describes citation lists according to the Chicago Manual of Style Chicago dtd Using a program that exports citation listings in XML, he enters info for lots of books..each is stored as an XML file

11. An XML scenario, 1 Bill creates a CSS document that describes how Chicago Style references lists look Chicago css Bill watches as the browser builds his reference list He could have also used XSLT…

12. An XML scenario, day 2 Bill downloads a new DTD, this one for MLA style citations, and a new style sheet too! Bill’s editor wants the same list in MLA format!

13. A bit more about DTDs DTDs are the place where XML tag sets are defined. They are pretty powerful meta-documents that determine what the folks reading and writing XML documents of a particular type can and cannot include, search for, etc.

14. A bit more about DTDs We can consider DTD’s, or their newer and more flexible counterparts called XML Schema, as workspaces. They define conceptual and physical boundaries for content developers Their design is a critical task for the content specialist. Well wrought DTD’s & Schema can greatly impact the both user experience, the development cycle, and, hence, the business/mission.

15. Let’s Do a Little XML exercise Think of a document type that has sufficiently granular content as to make it pretty simple to come up with some XML tags to describe it. ► Make up a quick list of the tags that you think you would need. ► Name your tags with semantic labels…that is, identify functional objects within the document…avoid using “structural” units like “paragraph”

16. Inside the DTD… A DTD is just a list of declarations. Let’s consider three common types : 1. The first declaration names the DOCTYPE.

17. Inside the DTD, 2 2. Then come declarations of document ELEMENTs.

18. Inside the DTD, 3 3. Finally, there may be declarations for ATTRIBUTES of an ELEMENT.

19. This is a DTD < !DOCTYPE citation [ ] >

20. 1. Find a movie review. 2. Pick out the “objects” and create markup by - using CSS to color code your news story with and a background color; each color should correspond to an item on the DTD - pasting the text into MS Word and using the “highlighter” tool to apply colors 3. Provide a key so we can see what your objects are Another X-ercise…we’ll review these next time!

21. A Few More X’s… ► What is XHTML? Quite simply, it is html redescribed as an XML DTD. Or another way to say it is that XHTML is the current default web DTD. The W3C may stop issuing HTML spec. in the future and just describe a baseline web DTD or Schema.

22. A Few More X’s… ► What is XSL? XSL-T? The xml stylesheet specification. XSLT is a very robust spec for transforming an XML document of one type into one of another type…meaning you can do more than just “style” information for display, you can also change it into other forms.

23. Good references for CSS & XML www.webmonkey.com www.xml.com www.w3c.org

24. Next Time… ► Semantic Markup 2 - XML, dynamic presentation, & multiple audience adaptation ► Read: Wright (pdf); Williams & Spyridakis (pdf) ► Post your XML color-coding exercise