gregdoolittle.com

i thought i totally bombed my test. i just found out that i got a 90.5, not nearly as bad as i thought. i agree that grades don’t mean much, but it shows i studied, and that i have at least a basic grasp of the material.

right now we’re doing xsl / xslt / xpath, which i find to be really useful. from the mac perspective, it’s great. i can finally see all of this xml stuff by using the transform to html method in xsl. i’m wondering now how many “html” pages that i look at are actually xml documents transformed with an xsl-template. as a project for myself, i’m going to try to write an xsl document that will syndicate this journal into my website, using an rss-feed with an xslt. if i can get that done quickly, i’ll know that this class is beginning to pay off.

i also found a pretty cool site with lots of interesting rss / xml feeds. i think part of the beauty of xsl is the ability to flow text into your own choice of formatting, and ability to control the information filtering. after i’ve gotten this journal to flow into my website, i’m going to try to do some sort of graphic display based on a live database… later on down the road, i need to figure out how to turn an html doc into xml. that way i can write a cool mashup, taking xml and html from two different sites to build a third site that integrates the data into a new and more useful perspective on the information (something similar to this one).

a few days after my first test, my teacher emailed me my grade: i got a 98. i wrote to her asking what the class average was to find out if i should really be impressed with myself or not, and she wrote back again: you got the highest grade in the class. woot! it always feels good to get a good grade.

but last night i had another test, which i know already, i didn’t do to well on. i think i’ll end up with mid-70’s at best. i studied a fair amount, but that highest grade in the class the first time around, kinda bumped me off my rock of motivation. now i know i’ll be studying reeeeal hard for the final. the test was on two chapters: namespaces and css. for posterity’s sake, i’m going to write down everything i think i got wrong (hopefully this’ll help me refrain from making the same mistakes in the future):

• in CSS, declare that the text of the “AUTHOR” element is capitalized: (should have written: AUTHOR {text-transform: capitalize}
• write a schema for the following xml doc in “russian doll” format (i was totally unprepared to write in “russian doll”. since we covered “russian doll” early in the chapter and “venetian blind” and “flat catalog” later in the chapter, i focussed on the later formats for writing schemas; i think i lost a lot of points on this one…
• also in the above problem (i forgot to declare the ISBN attribute as an ID data type (thus ensuring each ID holds a unique value)

we’ll see what else i missed (all the stuff that i can’t remember) when i get the test back in a few days

xml class is going swimmingly, despite being the only person in the class using a mac. normally being on a mac isn’t a disability, but with xml, there’s a number of issues that still haven’t been resolved (and how long has xml existed!). it’s hard to find a good xml-editor for a mac, and most osx browsers don’t “yet” support a number of features of xml (general entities, namespaces, multiple schemas)…

the silver lining is that i’ll be the only one in the class with a strong sense of how xml files look on OSX. i’ll know what not to use, to ensure that my pages are cross-platform compatible.