Week 9 Reading

Martin Bryan. Introducing the Extensible Markup Language (XML)
XML is a way to personalize one's documents and sites. Elements are marked, much in the way that things are tagged online. The fact that XML does not provide predefined set of tags or standardized template for documents increases the amount of personalization XML offers.

Uche Ogbuji. A survey of XML standards: Part 1
This article also highlights the personalization possible in XML. It contains a list of different XML types, as well as different standards. It also mentions "the XML is celebrated for its activity in creating informal but important standards to fill gaps left by the big organizations." This reminds me of Linux, in which the user can choose their "flavor" of operating system, and users are constantly improving and building upon their systems.

Extending your Markup: a XML tutorial by Andre Bergholz

• "Meaningful annotation is, in essence, what XML is all about." This makes sense to me.
  
• "It’s easiest to think of a DTD as a context-free grammar." This, however, does not. How can grammar not have a context? As a former English major, my concept of grammar has everything to do with organizing elements (in this case, words) in a way which will make sense to the reader. This cannot be done without a given context.

XML Schema Tutorial
This article claims that XML Schemas are preferable to DTD because...

• You don't have to learn a new language
• You can use your XML editor to edit your Schema files
• You can use your XML parser to parse your Schema files
• You can manipulate your Schema with the XML DOM
• You can transform your Schema with XSLT

It makes sense to use XML Schemas since they are written in XML.

Week 8 Muddiest Point

How does HTML code recognize color? How does it decide what shade of a certain color is the color in the code?

Week 8 Comments

On Jon Webster's blog:
http://jonwebsterslis2600blog.blogspot.com/2009/10/week-8-readings.html

On Veronica's blog:
http://infinitetechnology.blogspot.com/2009/10/reading-notes-for-week-8.html

Week 8 Readings

W3schools HTML Tutorial
At first I thought that I knew absolutely noting about HTML. That is still pretty much true. But there were a couple of things that did look familiar from -and I'm embarrassed to admit this- LiveJournal. While using LJ, people use simple html a lot. They use HTML to make "cuts" on their journal that will take them from a brief description of what their journal post is about to an extended entry. This makes the initial post smaller, which is vital to LJ. People on LJ usually have a very long "friends lists" that shows all the posts of each of their friends. These posts need to be short so that people can quickly scroll through their "flist" and choose which posts they want to delve deeper into. If a LJ user makes a very long post on their journal or on a community's journal without any cuts, you can bet they will get comments saying "CUT PLEASE!"

HTML Cheatsheet
This is much clearer than the first guide. I could see this being very useful for starting off with HTML.

W3 School Cascading Style Sheet Tutorial
It seems like CSS is in improvement on HTML for 2 reasons
1. It gives you the ability to give your backgrounds pictures and general richer visuals
2. More options when it comes to borders, outlines, lists, and tables.

Goans, D., Leach, G., & Vogel, T. M. (2006). Beyond HTML: Developing and re-imagining library web guides in a content management system.
It is encouraging that librarians were involved in developing their web guides. So often we are more or less at the mercy of the technology that we have to use. If we do not like our database, if our website isn't user friendly, tough luck, we're told. In this instance, the librarians and web developers designed something that will surely make it easier for librarians and their patrons to access information.

Week 7 Muddiest Point

I heard from the NPR news/quiz show Wait Wait Don't Tell Me that the "://" part of the URL is arbitrary and does not really serve any purpose. Are there other parts of HTTP that are superfluous or perhaps redundant?

Week 7 Comments

Instead of commenting on classmate's readings, I decided to watch their Jing videos.

Comment on Casey C.'s video:
http://cac160.blogspot.com/2009/10/assignment-4.html

Comment on Sara C.'s video
http://lis2600infotechnology.blogspot.com/2009/10/jing-assignment.html

Week 7 Reading

Howstuff Works "How Internet Infrastructure Works"
I was surprise when the article mentioned redundancy. In our past classes, we have been talking about technology, like databases, work to reduce redundancy. However, in the case of DNS, redundancy is a good thing. If one DNS fails at any given level, another one is there to take its place. I feel this can also be applied to routers. There seems to be an infinite number of paths through the internet by which routers can send information packets. They of course try for the simplest of fastest path, but there are likely to be countless others.

Dismantling Integrated Library Systems
This article made me think back to Christina Borgman's Scholarship in the Digital Age, which we had to read for LIS 2000. Her main point is that digital scholarship is still in its infancy and is still missing some key aspects. She also advises that libraries, scholars and publishers need to communicate with one another to form a system of scholarship that suites everyone. I would ILS creators and vendors to that list. It seems to be some miscommunication between libraries and the ILS vendors. Libraries expect their ILS to work a certain way or work with certain other technology and it ends up not being so. If ILS vendors are kept in mind while digital scholarship is being formed, libraries would be better able to organize and access all the information digital scholarship can offer.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page on Google
I knew I liked these guys. Their wish to do good (as in good deeds, not in "well") is sincere and evident in their work. I think a major part of Google's success is that they are never satisfied with what they have accomplished. They never say "What we have is good enough. We don't need to think of any more improvements." They are not even close to running out of ideas, and I doubt they ever will be.

Week 6 Muddiest Point

I don't have a muddiest point for week 6. It was so long ago. Simply Ages.

Assignment 4: Tutorial

For my assignment, I demonstrated on of my favorite websites, Cake Wrecks.

Here is the video.
Here are the 5 images: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Poke around Cake Wrecks and thank me later.

Week 6 Comments

Comment on Jon Webster's blog:
http://jonwebsterslis2600blog.blogspot.com/2009/10/week-6-readings.html

Comment on Christie Graci's blog:
http://christiegraci.blogspot.com/2009/10/class-readings-week-6.html

Assignment 3: CiteULike Library

I chose 3 of my favorite books as my topics. They are...
*Orlando by Virginia Woolf (a novel about a man who transforms into a woman)
*In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (the first "true crime" novel about a 1959 homicide)
*The Jeeves and Wooster Series by P.G. Wodehouse (a collection of short stories about and Englishman and his valet).

My CiteULike Library:
http://www.citeulike.org/user/jpm82