Re: [xml-dev] Seek your recommendation on content for a 3-day classon XM

Hmmm why 3 days. Thats a heck of a long time.

When I have done this I start by correlating to what they should already know. Usually that is HTML so I pick some HTML usually something involving a table, and I ask questions about it.

Then I represent the same information as XML and ask similar questions about it.

I also talk about the landscape of structured and semi-structured data. What makes data structured, what makes it semi-structured what are the different formats that exemplify these categorisations. What happens if you try to use a structured format to represent semi-structure and vice-versa.

Then with each respective format - what can you do with it and what's available to manipulate it. In my case I was talking to people who knew EDI so compare and contrast.

I would spend time talking about navigating XML with XPath and maybe comparing and contrasting with JSON or EDI formats what you can do.

Those are the basics. There are several niches that could be traversed thereonin.

On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 2:35 AM, <cmarchand@oxiane.com> wrote:

1st day : very basic. History, SGML, CSV, and so on. Why XML. What XML is used for (publishing, financial, etc...). What encoding is and why it is important. Namespaces. Well formness. Introduction to grammars, and tools to check validity (I do give some command-line tools, written in java with open-source libraries for this). Namespaces are very important, it is almost never understood. I use a simple comparison : "you are 3 Peter in this room ; how do I distinguish one Peter from another one ? By you surname ; Namespaces are surnames for elements". Differences between URL and URI.

2nd day : technologies in XML World. XPath (you have a great tutorial on XPath 2.0, you can spend half a day on XPath). Xslt. XQuery, perhaps. I do a lab on XSLT to produce a file with all-countries all-codes based on ISO-3166 from the wikipaedia page : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2. It's a very short XSL, but very impressive transfo for beginners. If they are not able to do the lab, I do the demo

3rd day : more advanced technologies : PI and a sample to use it in browser. CSS formatting if they are front users. XSLT methodology : many simple XSL chained. XProc (a demo is enough). Advanced XSLT (I like to show a XSL that generates a XSL to split a file with a header and a footer ; http://saxon.markmail.org/search/?q=split%20header%20footer#query:split%20header%20footer+page:1+mid:bnwh7hjxe4irqm7v+state:results for example...), on a financial data sample. And a lab on the students' problem, with their own data.

Hope that helps,
Christophe

Le 2017-02-22 22:30, Costello, Roger L. a écrit :

Hi Folks,

I will be teaching a 3-day class - 7 hours training per day - at my
company on XML foundations.

By "XML foundations" I don't mean to imply that the course is
exclusively on XML. I can cover other XML-related technologies.

The class will be a combination of lectures and hands-on lab
exercises.

The students are professional engineers and have no familiarity with
XML. Possibly they have some familiarity with HTML.

Questions:

1. What topics should I cover?

2. What are the key points that the students should take away?

3. Suppose I was teaching this class 10 years ago. How should today's
class differ from the class of 10 years ago?

/Roger

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