Quick Questions
Q1. People who prepare XML documents sometimes put part of the document in a CDATA section.
Why would they do that?
How is the CDATA section indicated?
If CDATA sections hadn't been invented, would there be any other way to achieve the same effect?
Sometimes, the contents of an XML document might have characters which have a special meaning in XML such as "<", ">" and "&". When an XML document is being parsed, text between XML tags is also parsed so...
Thursday, 8 December 2011
Saturday, 26 November 2011
CMT3315 Lab 06 - Character Encoding
Today's post deals with character encoding and how it can be specified in XML documents.
Character Encoding
Character encoding is the process of converting any character into another form which facilitates its transmission over a telecommunications network or its storage.
Early examples of character encoding are Morse code - which converts characters into a series of long and short presses...
Saturday, 12 November 2011
CMT3315 Lab 05 - XML Well-formedness & DTDs
The last post covered the basics of XML syntax and document type definitions. This weeks post is a continuation, answering some more questions related to XML well formedness and DTDs. Where possible, lab questions were reproduced before providing the answer.
Quick Questions
Q1. <:-/> This is a smiley. Is it also a well-formed XML document? Say why.
From a structural point...
Tuesday, 8 November 2011
CMT3315 LAB04 - XML Syntax 2
Today's post introduces Document Type Definition (DTD) syntax and answers a number of questions relating to XML syntax and DTDs.
Document Type Definition
In last week's post we created the following XML document containing information about a small music collection:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<DOCTYPE musicCollection>
<!--Prolog ends here. -->
<musicCollection>
<cd index="1">
<title>Innuendo</title>
<artist>Queen</artist>
<tracks>
...
Thursday, 3 November 2011
CMT3315 Lab 03 - XML Syntax 1
Today's post introduces the basics of XML syntax and answers a number of questions related to this topic.
XML document structure & syntax
The basic idea behind XML is to produce documents whose structure can be understood by software applications.
In an XML document, pieces of text that have special meaning are marked up using tags. A tag is simply a word between angle brackets such as "<name>".
An XML document is made up of 3 parts:
A prolog (optional);
The document or root element;
Other miscellaneous content following...
CMT3315 LAB 02 - XML vs HTML
In this post we will be having a look at the similarities and differences between XML and HTML. As discussed in my
previous post XML is
a subset of SGML designed to make the knowledge structure of a document known to a software package. In essence,
it enables a software package to "understand" the structure of a document. HTML was also derived from SGML but appeared before XML.
HTML
HTML is made up of a standard set of tags specifically designed to create web pages meant to be understood and displayed by web browsers.
Soon after its...
CMT3315 Intro - XML, What it is and where it came from
Given the summer recess, it has been a while since my last post but it's time to pull the proverbial socks up and get back to work. During this semester, the blog will be focusing mostly on the eXtensible Markup Language - XML for short - and there's a lot to cover, so let's get right to it:
First Things First
So what is XML? Before answering that question one must understand where XML comes from and more importantly its purpose. To do that we need to take a look at the early days of computing, back in the 1960's,...
Tuesday, 19 July 2011
Up in the Cloud
Surely, one of the most popular buzz words since Web 2.0 has to be "Cloud Computing". The trouble is that there are many different schools of thought on what the Cloud is or should be. "Platform as a Service", "Software as a Service", "on-demand computing" and "Internet as a platform" are just some of the phrases used to define cloud computing. However you wish to call it, to me Cloud Computing is about history repeating itself, the next phase of a cycle. We're shifting software and data back from our desktop PCs to remote...
Thursday, 14 July 2011
Social What?
Social Networks have been around since before the internet itself. Ever since computers could connect to each other, so did the users at each end. The social networking heavyweights of today such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are just latest products of a long (and vicious) evolution of the genre. I’ve always had this sort of love-hate relationship with social media and as the products evolve so too are my feelings evolving into a love-to-hate attitude.
The Evolution of the Social NetworkThe roots of social media can be...
Sunday, 3 July 2011
Mobile Devices and Geolocation
The topic of mobile phone development is a minefield of myths, false truths and misconceptions. In this post I will try to clear things up a bit as much as I can and also take a look at how to exploit geolocation from our mobile devices.
The Mobile WebOne of the most common misconceptions I come across is that there is no need for a website to adapt to a mobile device. The reasoning behind this idea is the fact that the internet is platform independent and that the browser should do the dirty work. When faced with such an argument I tend to...
Wednesday, 22 June 2011
HTML 5 & CSS 3
This weeks topics are the much anticipated HTML5 and CSS3 specifications, the next generation in web page markup and styling.
IntroductionHTML5 is the successor to HTML4 which came out way back in 1999. Back then the internet was a very different place where notions such as web applications, e-commerce and social networking were yet unheard of. The web has changed a lot since then but the fundamental...
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