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Course Description
This course introduces students to XML, the extensible markup language. XML is a W3C recommendation for a second-generation web language, but its importance goes for beyond that. XML is rapidly becoming the lingua franca for the exchange of structured information. This is the kind of data that librarians deal with. This course will be fundamental to any librarian going into technical services.
Much of XML's power rests on software that has yet to fully mature, and some of the contents of the course may be This course will deal in depth with XML as it can be used today. It will focus on applications rather than theory.
Course objectives
After taking this course students
Prerequisites
Students should be familiar with the World Wide Web, and should be able to use a MS Windows computer, i.e. click on an icon to run a program. Students should also be familiar with basic concepts of computer hardware and software, concepts like files, memory. In addition, basic familiarity with HTML will be an advantage. Students that have no prior exposure to HTML could take lis900c as an introduction, but this is not a prerequisite, because that course does a lot of other things besides raw HTML. Everything that goes beyond that will be explained in class or by personal interaction with the instructor.
Instructor
Thomas
Krichel
Palmer School of Library
and Information Science
C.W. Post
Campus of Long Island
University
720 Northern Boulevard
Brookville, NY 11548–1300
krichel@openlib.org
work phone: +1–(516)299–2843
Private contact details may be obtained from the online CV.
Class structure
Classes will be held in the computer lab in the Palmer School. Each class will have some presentation by the instructor. However a majority of time the class will work directly with their computers under the supervision of the instructor.
Class details:
| 0 | 2002—08—12, morning | Introduction, Unicode, URIs |
| 1 | 2002—08—12, afternoon | well-formed XML, and Namespaces |
| 2 | 2002—08—13, morning | XSL I |
| 3 | 2002—08—13, afternoon | XSL II |
| 4 | 2002—08—14, morning | XSL III |
| 5 | 2002—08—14, afternoon | XSL IV |
| 6 | 2002—08—15, morning | XML Schema I |
| 7 | 2002—08—15, afternoon | XML Schema II |
| 8 | 2002—08—16, morning | XML Schema III |
| 9 | 2002—08—16, afternoon | XML Schema IV |
Readings
There are literally tons of books on XML around, choose one that you like. Castro (2001) is a good initial book. However it is not sufficent for the course. To cover the course topic and beyond, you should look for books that cover XSLT and XML Schema extensively, or buy two separate books. On XSLT, Kay (2001). I am not convinced as to its virtues for an audience with little prior exposure to computing. On XML Schema, I found that Duckett et al. (2001) is a very good book.
Most of the material used in class are the tutorials by Roger L. Costello.