Notes and Activities from Week Three (September 4)

Tonight's Key Ideas

• Document Type Definitions (DTDs) and XML Schema are both crucial technologies to working with XML; however, the work you're doing as information architects--building XML documents--precedes that work. It's more important, at this point, for you to be able to write well-formed XML than it is for you to fully command DTDs or XML Schema. But do be aware of them, as they may very well come up in any future professional work you do with XML (such as working with another XML Application).

Reading Discussion

• Which of the Information Architecture Components in IAWWW (pp. 49-52) seem most salient when writing XML?
• How might information architects go about handling the "need to escape from [their] own mental models of content labeling and organization"? How does this relate to Applen's "Theory of Aboutness," particularly "R-about" (pp. 205-206)?
• What connections can we make between writing an XML vocabulary and the IAWWW chapters on Labeling Systems (Ch. 6) and Thesauri, Controlled Vocabularies, and Metadata (Ch. 9)?

XML Discussion

• DTDs and XML Schema: Differences, benefits, appropriate uses of each
• Namespaces versus DTDs and Schema
• Referring to namespaces and using them in your own XML (demonstration with XHTML)

XML Demonstration: Namespaces

• Add a default, example namespace (either on the root element, or the hcard element; what's the difference?)
• Add a prefixed namespace for XHTML (http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml)
• Paste in the XHTML from your hCard
• Use the proper prefix for the XHTML elements (and attributes?) in the hCard
• Test in Firefox

Project 1 Workshopping: Questions to Consider

• Who are your partner's audience/users? In what context?
• Is your partner's context obvious from the vocabulary he/she has created?
• Compare your partner's emergent document hierarchy with Figure 5-12 in IAWWW (p. 71). Would you describe it as "narrow and deep"? Or "broad and shallow"? Is the hierarchy appropriate for her users, context, and content?