Muddiest Point for CSS lecture

Nothing too confusing this week. It was nice to go over everything twice in class and lab.

XML Readings

“An Introduction to the Extensible Markup Language (XML)”

by Martin Bryan of The SGML Centre

You never hear about SGML anymore, does it still exist or is it still relevant?

So, beyond the fact that XML allows you to compound documents, it lets you identify where digital objects appear, how they are controlled, as well as add metadata to a file. It isn’t however a set of tags like HTML, but a way of using tags predefined by some type of governing body.

I get how you define attributes and tags, but where do definitions live? That must be the processing instructions and hyperlink to a document type declaration.

“Extending Your Markup,” Andre Bergholz

SGML is what lets you write define the structure.

Is what was described in the previous article DTD or schema?

The stylesheet sounds pretty interesting – follow up on it.

“A survey of XML standards: Part 1,” Uche Ogbuji

Catalogs: instructions for how an XML processor revolves entity identifiers into documents.

Namespaces: a mechanism for universal element and attribute naming. Can be identical to another language if you define it differently here.

Base: associates elements with UROs

Inclusions (XInclude): a system to merge XML documents.

Inforset: a way of describing objects with special properties.

Pointer: defines a language that can be used to refer to fragments of an XML document.

XLink: framework for expressing links in XML

Relax NG vs. W3C XML Schema vs. Schematron: Competing schemas, who won?

W3C Schema tutorial

A tutorial on schemas from W3C, nuff’ said.

Assignment 4: Personal Bibliographic Management Systems

Here's the link to Assignment 4: http://www.citeulike.org/user/brh68

Muddiest Point for last week, whichever one it was

What has changed between HTML 1 and HTML 4? And how is XHTML different from these?

Unit 9 Readings: CSS

Starting with HTML + CSS

A pretty straightforward tutorial. Everything worked great for me up until it came to separating the stylesheet. It took moving it to an actual directory rather than just having it all on the desktop for some reason. Anyway, it worked!

Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos, Chapter 2 of the book Cascading Style Sheets, designing for the Web.

Does CSS use curly braces ({ }) and colon (:) for its property and value to distinguish it from a metaldata language?  The brevity aspects like comma and semicolon separated lists (e.g. H1, H2, H3) are really nice.

Presumbably all browsers are CSS enhanced at this point. Especially if they’re talking about Netscape.

W3 CSS

W3 never ceases to amaze me. So useful, so easy to follow, and when I do I always learn like 10 new things. This is more useful and indepth than the Starting with HTML+CSS link, though that was also a helpful example.

Muddiest Point for Week 8: Submarine Internet Cables

So, there are actually cables connecting the Internet across the ocean and across continents? Do they ever need repair? For instance, do earthquakes and the like damage them, and if so what happens? Are they managed by private companies, international government cooperatives, or what?

Unit 8 Readings: HTML and Web Authoring

HTML Tutorial

W3 never ceases to impress. This tutorial helped me understand what HTML actually does, and assisted me in separating it from my own preconceived notions. I had previously thought HTML was simply just tagging how digital objects appear on a web page (e.g. color, size, placement, font, etc.). However, the sections on “headings” and “meta” made me rethink this somewhat, as they begin to give HTML some contextual meaning – that is, it can apparently also describe what something is rather than only how it looks.

HTML Cheatsheet

I know I’m going to be reusing this again; nice to have it all in one place. One questions: W3 describes line breaks as really needing only an open break without ever closing it, and HXTML as needing the < br/ >, do you just use the one with the break for convenience sake? Will it always work regardless of whether its absolutely necessary?

Doug Goans, Guy Leach, and Teri Vogel, “Beyond HTML”

Wow, just from the opening paragraphs you can tell their FrontPage project was not going to go well. Right off the bat you see all the examples of why projects fail: lack of standards, communication, and training. I love that everyone was using their own fonts, colors, and layouts, it must have felt slightly psychotic going from section to section or even page to page. Still, it’s unfortunate that it took the web development librarian three years to even begin to implement standards.

So basically, librarians were getting hung-up on presentation when what they needed to be focusing on was content. The CMS allowed them to plug-in content, which could then be run through some type of stylesheet to give it a uniform appearance.

I’m impressed they had a blogging system in place in 2001, and had the foresight to start including social media into their site from the moment they began to standardize it. Guess it just shows how collaboration between web/computer specialists and librarians lead to the best systems for libraries. Also, this is yet another example of the superiority of largely homemade websites as opposed to commercial or opensource packages.

Muddiest Point for Week 7

I'm a little confused about what exactly an Intranet is. Are LANs also Intranets?

Unit 7 Readings

Andrew K. Pace, “Dismantling Integrated Library Systems”

Integration may have been lost as library technology made the jump onto the web, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be recovered. As vendor software comes and goes it will likely grow to meet demands and standards as they are established. What will increasingly distinguish products is as the author says, “new products and alliances,” (34). Successful vendors are those who will take into account the library communities resistance to change quickly by innovating there products on top of existing products as much as possible, that way the changes are gradual and older versions/systems are not left quite as behind.

Jeff Tyson, “How Internet Infrastructure Works”

POP=Point of Presence, or the place for local users to access a company’s network through phone or dedicated line. Managed (coordinated?) by high-level networks connected through NAPs or Network Access Points.

“What is incredible about this process is that a message can leave one computer and travel halfway across the world through several different networks and arrive at another computer in a fraction of a second!” Indeed, but how exactly is it possible? In addition, how are the various continents physically connected? Are there just big underwater cables stretching from here to there?

The backbones are clearly very fast, are home connections slower because the limbs to the backbone are slower? If I was the only person on the Internet one day would I be able to take advantage of OC-48 speeds, or would my home modem, router, cables, etc. still limit me?

The IP address examples must be ghost addresses because there’s nothing there. Spooky!

I feel like the majority of this article was covered pretty well in class, but the DNS and URL discussions helped to clear a few things up.

Brin and Page video

A 20-minute presentation on why Google’s founders think their company’s great. Nothing is really addressed in any depth, though the model of who is using Google and where was interesting. I wondered how their Montessori education influenced Google, they mention it, but not really what that meant to the company. Also, beyond the mention of the future and showing a slide of HAL 9000, what did they actually say about the future? Nothing really, Page just showed a tiny screenshot of a blog that Google’s algorithm was making fun of.

Assignment 2 part 2 - Jing video on screencast.com

Here's the link to my Jing video:
http://www.screencast.com/users/byrce/folders/Default/media/737d125d-fe8b-413e-a649-d34d24dbe488

Assignment 2 part 1 - Jing slides on Flickr

Follow the urls to see my Jing screen captures:
Slide 1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/66255398@N07/6215805712/in/photostream
Slide 2: http://www.flickr.com/photos/66255398@N07/6215291153/in/photostream
Slide 3: http://www.flickr.com/photos/66255398@N07/6215291205/in/photostream
Slide 4: http://www.flickr.com/photos/66255398@N07/6215805948/in/photostream

Slide 5: http://www.flickr.com/photos/66255398@N07/6215291251/in/photostream
Slide 6: http://www.flickr.com/photos/66255398@N07/6215805866/in/photostream
Slide 7: http://www.flickr.com/photos/66255398@N07/6215805904/in/photostream

Week 5 Muddiest Point

All clear this week. No muddy points.

Unit 6 Readings

“Computer network” Wikipedia

Better be careful of the HAM guys if you’re networking.

What are the tradeoffs for wire choices? Why doesn’t everyone just use optical fiber? Cost, or are there other factors involved? Also, when comparing wireless technologies, are they all equally fast? Or just different reaches?

TCP/IP: defines the addressing, identification, and routing specification.

Bluetooth=PAN technology (Portable Area Network)

LAN (local) links several computer is one location. Is there a real difference between LAN and PAN beyond the 10 meter range? Perhaps it’s the reliance on firewire/USB rather than Ethernet more than range. Can LAN also be PAN then?

Intranets are apparently not internets, but web browsers and P2P. Internet on the other hand is actually the backbone of what I think the Internet is.

In firewalls, what makes one source safe and another unsafe. How is this determined?

“LAN” Wikipedia

Mostly use Ethernet and wi-fi. Ethernet is from 1973!

If at “higher layers” TCP/IP is the standard, why is TCP/IP based networking’s market share “much reduced”? Especially if the continue to be both standard and influential?

"Management of RFID in Libraries," Karen Coyle

An interesting premise, and it makes sense for books. However, it seems to become problematic as you move away from books to other media types. The fact that thin items can potentially cause the tags to interfere with other RFID tags seems particularly awkward. However, so long as you don’t care about where something is on the shelf, but use it primarily to checkout media and prevent it being stolen, then it seems like it would work fine. I wonder how the field has changed in 5-years, is RFID standard in library books? Was it deemed too time consuming or costly financially?