CMT3315 – Laboratory 01 – 30 September 09

Questions

1. The first browser to read and support XML was Microsoft IE4

2. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is a style sheet language used to describe the formatting and looks of HTML or any other document written in a mark up language. Normally it is used for designing web pages written in HTML or XHTML, however it can be applied to XML documents as well.

3. XSL stands for Extensible Stylesheet Language and is used to refer to a group of language which are used for transforming XML documents.

XSL is split into three parts which are: -

1. XSL Transformation
2. XSL Formatting Objects
3. XPath

XSL Transformation is also known as XSLT and is the most important part of XSL. XSLT became a W3C Recommendation 16. November 1999.
It is used to transform an XML document into another XML document, or another type of document that is recognized by a browser, like HTML and XHTML. It uses XPath to find information in an XML document by navigating through the elements and attributes of an XML document.

4. CSS and XSL are both style sheets, but their used for different purposes. This is because with CSS it is possible to define the styles of each element of HTML and XML which allows control over the colours, fonts, positioning, and background. CSS has is its limitation though; which is why XSL is used to do extra formatting work that CSS can’t do.
XSL is used to structure documents whereby having the ability to control the order of the elements, calculations and addition of content. XSL is a much more powerful language and is used mainly for XML documents allowing the ability to change the elements to be displayed in the order of the programmer’s choice. Along with the fact that you can also replace words and convert XML to XHTML, it is clear to see that XSL offers more variety BUT is also a harder language to implement then CSS. The basic idea is to “use CSS when you can but use XSL when you must” Bos (1999). This clearly makes sense as CSS is easier to implement and can do the simple things very well such as changing HTML element and background colour but if you needed to do more complicated stuff, such as re-arranging the elements then it can be done so with XSL.

5. The relational structure of the HTML/XHTML documents forms a Document Tree. Elements inside an HTML/XHTML document are linked together using the tree relationship. This is used to properly implement CSS selectors, and other functions related to DOM such as JavaScript methods and functions.

Lecture Reflection-WEEK 1 – Understanding

In the first lecture the tutor gave a brief introduction on the concepts of web documents and web technologies, in which the example of Edwin Smith Papyrus was used. The example consists of an ancient document about medicine which has a strong structure and can be organised and presented as an instructional package. Web technologies and this concept are similar in which they are used to present information on the web.

A concise look at the mark-up languages history were looked into in which a set of symbols were used in order to communicate with typesetters, which was developed by Charles Goldfarb, Edward Mosher and Raymond Lorie in the 1060’s. Eventually the thinking of word processing was thought of in order of storing documents onto computers. This concept was the foundation HTML and XML were built upon.

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