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Report
 

Introduction

Since I had available not more than a week to accomplish my 'first steps in XML', I set my objectives quite low. So, I did not go for an input interface in the beginning. I did not plan to have different databases either, but while progressing, it seemed convenient to distinguish between articles and books. It was a little bit of a surprise to me that I actually went beyond after all. This happened thanks to the fact that certain routines had already been written by former stafiens and thanks to Vivian who finally made it running. The result is an interface that fulfills my current needs. It is yet basic but operational.


Script structure

In order to accomplish this exercise, it was necessary to create three files of different funcions:
  • The file XML that specifies what is in a document. The content is processed by Cocoon, a publishing framework that uses XSL transformation capabilities. The XML files created for this program lib.sxml and article.sxml are kept simple. There is just one kind of data to be archived and thus no need for more sophistication.
  • The file DTD that stands for "document type definition" which constrains the information model of the document. It specifies which elements are allowed in the XML document and which ones are not allowed. The DTD file can thus be considered as "grammar" of the XML file. The grammar file lib.dtd used here only contains elements corresponding to the simplicity of the SXML files
  • The file XSL that stands for "extensible style language" that is divided into two parts: a transformation language for converting XML trees to alternative trees, and a formatting language for specifying the appearance of the elements of a XML tree. In my files lib.xsl and article.xsl , it puts the inputs in an alphabetical order of the first author's name.
For the interface that allows to archive new inputs, I created in addition a formular add_entry.php highlighting the mandatory information (according to the DTD file). The inputs are treated via a php file entry_fwd.php which was already available (written by Olivier Clavel) and which just had to be adjusted to my personal needs.


Discussion

This is propably the first time I gave serious thoughts to the design of a page. Considering this site as a useful tool for the continuation of my studies, it will hopefully be a source for further ideas in XML scripting. In the first place I intended to implement something basic while taking into account certain aspects of ergonomy and functionality. By doing so, I was undoubtedly inspired by other web sites, to be precise by Roberto Ortelli's. I am quite satisfied with the result.

The data in the literature table are clearly structured for my personal needs. I presume that the title provides most association with the pertinent content and is hence emphasized in size. A second indication is likely to be the author whose name is emphasized in bold color and whose firstname appears in regular font-weight to avoid confusion between both. Personal notes which can be any data like a location in the university's library or certain keywords are on the right hand side. The required and optional entry of data in order to identify a book and its actuality are reduced to a minimum. In the next step, I could well imagine to elaborate the program in the direction that every entry obtains an ID number. This would enable me to better extract single information with aid of XSL files and of course, to use just one data storage file, thus XML-file. As well, a search engine would be helpful.