Re: [xml-dev] Seek your recommendation on content for a 3-day class on XML foundations

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"Costello, Roger L." <>
Date
2017-02-23T07:35:11Z
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Re: [xml-dev] Seek your recommendation on content for a 3-day class on XML foundations
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