[xml-h] getting started

Simon St.Laurent simonstl@simonstl.com
Fri, 17 Jan 2003 12:19:15 -0500


Bill.Brown@desertschools.org (Bill Brown) writes:
>I notice that you titled this message "getting started" and I worry
>that this list might be too advanced for me. I am a subscriber to
>Webdesign-L and a long-time web developer (about four years in
>server-side stuff and eight years in HTML). I have a very superficial
>familiarity with the technologies you describe below and absolutely
>none with several of the newer projects you list.

That's perfectly fine - SkunkLink and VELLUM have reached very few
people so far.  More people have heard of XLink, but few people are
using it except for a few bits in SVG, XML, and XBRL.  The hypertext
thread that most commonly works in practice is HTML/XHTML, and I
definitely expect a lot of discussion on XML/HTML interactions.

>What interests me most in this area--what brought me to join this
>list--is the use of XML as a foundation for a web site and XSLT to
>transform said XML into a variety of formats. I like the idea of XML
>and really like the idea of XSLT, but I'm not able to wrap my mind
>around the notion of converting my current HTML into XML. It seems
>like you'd ideally want a standardized DTD throughout the site for
>consistency's sake, but it would be difficult to make your favorite
>links section look semantically like your blog or writings section.
>Perhaps you would need to create a variety of DTDs, but it seems like
>a lot of work.

That sounds like a great discussion to me, better than the dull history
I'm providing so far.

I gave a presentation a little while back that might address some of
that, but it's really only a very rough outline and is likely too
XML-centric:
http://simonstl.com/articles/web2xml/webapp.html

>At any rate, such a discussion seems very much outside of the contours
>of the discussion you are trying to initiate below. Am I correct in
>assuming that this list is for exploring advanced topics in XML?

I'm hoping this list will bring hypertext in XML from being something
obscure and impenetrable to something ordinary and accessible.  I think
I prefer the perspective you've brought in this message to the "advanced
topics" option, though it'll probably be a mix of both.
-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org