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.