Muddiest Point for Week 13

Can you upload the slides you used to explain Assignment 6 this week? Thanks a lot :) 

Muddiest Point for Week 11

Can you recommend some website editors for us? I use a text editor to do my Assignment 5, but I also want to try a website editor.

Muddiest Point for Week 10

Two questions for Assignmrnt5:

1. Are there any specific requirements for the third page "myfavorite.html"? Such as the number of texts, images, and links. Is it ok if I only display some pictures?


2. Do we need to give an introduction about the links we listed in the forth page "link.html"? Or we can just simply list them?

Muddiest Point for Week 9

    This week's muddiest point is about Assignment5. I noticed that according to the requirement, we can use either website editors or text editors to create our website. Could you please recommend some editors for us?

Notes for Week 10 Required Readings

Martin Bryan. Introducing the Extensible Markup Language (XML)
http://www.is-thought.co.uk/xmlintro.htm

    XML: subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language, designed to make it easy to interchange structured documents over the internet.

XML can:

• bring multiple files together to form compound documents
• identify where illustrations are to be incorporated into text files, and the format used to encode each illustration
• provide processing control information to support programs
• add editorial comments to a file

XML components

• including documents,entities,elements, and attribute (properties)
• a formal syntax described the relationships between the entities, elements and attributes to tell the computer how it can recognize the component parts of each document

    Defining tag sets: must create a Document Type Definition that formally identifies the relationships between the various elements that form the documents.
    Defining the attributes of elements: various forms of elements can be given suitable attributes to specify the properties to be applied to them

    XML can also add standard text to a file and handle characters that are outside the standard character set.

Three types of markup

• an XML processing instruction identifying the version of XML, the way it is encoded, and whether it references other files or not
• a document type declaration that either contains the formal markup declarations in its internal subset or references a file containing the relevant markup declarations
• a fully-tagged document instance which consists of a root element. The element type name must match that assigned as the document type name in the document type declaration, within which all other markup is nested

    If all 3 components are present, and the document instance conforms to the rule defined in the document type definition, the document is valid;
    If only the last component is present, and no formal model is present, the XML processor can only check whether the document instance is well-formed.

Extending you Markup: a XML tutorial by Andre Bergholz
http://xml.coverpages.org/BergholzTutorial.pdf

    Also an introduction to XML. However, to me, this article is easier to understand than the previous one.

XML

• a semantic language that lets you meaningfully annotate text.
• a well-formed XML starts with a prolog and contains exactly one element

DTD: defines the structure of XML

• declared in the XML document's prolog by using the !DOCTYPE tag
• let users specify the set and the order of tags, and the attributes associated with each
• valid: a well-formed XML that conforms to its DTD

DTD elements

• Nonterminal elements: contain sub-elements, which can be grouped as sequences or choices
• Terminal elements: can be declared as parsed character data #PCDATA, EMPTY, or ANY. When declared as ANY, it can contain suv-elements of any declared type, as well as character data.

DTD attributes

• can be declared by using !ATTLIST tag
• can be optional #IMPLIED, required #REQUIRED, or fixed #fixed. Fixed attributes must have a default value

Extensions: let users link more than one source to more than one target

• namespaces: avoid name clashes, declared by xmlns
• can be referred to using the prefix mybib

Links

• Xlink: describes how 2 documents can be linked
• Xpointer: enables addressing individual parts of an XML document
• Xpath: used by Xpointer to describe location paths

Xlink specification

• href: specifies a URI together with a fragment identifier
• role: indicates the purpose of the linked document
• show: specifies what is to be done with the linked document when it is loaded
• actuate: specifies when the action indicated by show should occur

Stylesheets

• XSL transformations (XSLT): transform XML into HTML to bypassing the formatting language, and restructure XML documents
• XSL formatting objects

XML Schema: allow users to define datatypes

• Document Definition Markup Language (DDML), known as XSchema
• Document Content Description (DCD)
• Schema for Object-oriented XML (SOX)
• XML-Data (replaced by DCD)

XML Schema uses its own namespace

• complexType: indicates a complex datatype associated with the nonterminal element BOOK and consisting of other elements and attributes
• supports a variety of atomic datatypes
• supports inheritance as part of the more general concept of derivation

XML Schema Tutorial
http://www.w3schools.com/Schema/default.asp

    At first, the tutorial introduces the XML Schema, explains the reasons to use it, and how to use it.
    Then, the tutorial divides the XML Schema into 3 types, including simple, complex, and data types. In each of the 3 types, the tutorial provides specific examples to explain how to create different parts of the schema.
    Again, this tutorial is a very useful tool to learn how to create XML Schema for its specific examples, just like other tutorials the W3Schools provides.

Muddiest Point for Week 8

    This week's muddiest point came from the first reading. It says there are three ways to insert CSS. However, the third one, the inline style, loses many advantages of a style sheet. I would like to know more about the inline style, and if it really loses many advantages, then why this style exist?

Notes for Week 9 Required Readings

W3 School Cascading Style Sheet Tutorial
http://www.w3schools.com/css/

A tutorial for CSS with specific examples.

CSS: Cascading Style Sheets

• HTML was not intended to contain tags for formatting. In order to format documents, CSS is needed as to define how to display HTML elements
• Styles are normally saved in external .css files. Therefore, people can edit one single file when changing the appearance and layout of all the pages

CSS Syntax

• Selector: points to the HTML elements we want to style
• Declaration: each of them include a property name and a value, separated by a colon

Insert CSS

• External style sheet: be used when the style is applied to many pages
• Internal style sheet: be used when a single document has a unique style
• Inline style: use this sparingly (loses many of the advantages of a style sheet)
• Multiple style: the value will be inherited from the more specific one

CSS tutorial: starting with HTML + CSS
http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/011/firstcss

A very specific and vivid example which explained not only how to create HTML and CSS files, but also how to make them work together.

Explained how to add color and fonts, create navigation bar, styling links, and horizontal line separately with corresponding codes.

Chapter 2 of the book Cascading Style Sheets, designing for the web by Hakon Wium Lie and Bert Bos (2nd edition)
http://www.w3.org/Style/LieBos2e/enter/

An introduction to CSS

CSS rule: a statement about one stylistic aspect of one or more elements. A set of one or more rules that apply to an HTML document is a style sheet.

CSS-enhanced browser is needed for CSS to work.

Common tasks:

• Setting colors & backgrounds
• Setting fonts and margins
• Links

CSS allows users to supply their personal style sheet

This week's reading is really interesting. By knowing more about CSS and how to make my website looks good, creating HTML files becomes more fun to me.