Hitting the Wall

I’ve now made it through about 1 hour and 45 minutes of the XML Essential Training on Lynda.com. The narrator has been using Visual Studio Express for all his examples, but since it’s not available for Mac, I’ve been using BBEdit instead. It has fewer features (the BB does stand for BareBones, after all), but at least gives me the basic functionality I need to work with the exercise files and create new ones of my own.

So far, I’ve been able to follow along and even create my own simple XML and CSS documents, which has been encouraging. However, I’m now approaching what are called data islands and finding that this may be where the tutorial veers off from what is useful for me. This is for a couple of reasons:

First, the tutorial was released in mid-2006, so I’ve been expecting that at least some of the information presented will be out of date. Four years later, enough of the basics are still intact that I can follow the instruction and have my examples work in present-day browsers (I’m running Firefox 3.6.12 both at home and at work). When the tutorial pointed out that, as of the release date, data islands only worked in Internet Explorer, I was curious to find whether that’s progressed in the past 4 years. The results I’ve gotten have been confusing at best, unfortunately. The use of data islands doesn’t seem to be very widespread, so it’s hard to tell if it’s relevant to XML practices today, much less to my own applications.

Second, the tutorial is, as expected, headed down a path where the minute details of coding are explained with no real-world applications to ground them. Based off of the examples the narrator has used, I can create two mock business cards or two tables in a browser, complete with hideous Web 1.0 formatting. But it makes me wonder, how in the world could that be useful for taking substantial real life information and translating it? I’m finding it difficult to make the connection between having large amounts of uncoded data and getting all of that data formatted in a useful, efficient way. As a disclaimer, I don’t want to demean the tutorials; I think they’re great if they’re relevant to what someone needs to know (perhaps as more of a professional programmer than a casual learner like me).

Given that I don’t have a ton of free time to spend watching these tutorials, I think I may pause on this one and try out the Real-World XML tutorial for a bit. I may need to hop back over for essential training on some of the things I haven’t hit yet (DTDs, for example), but I think this might be the best approach for the purposes of absorbing as much applicable information as possible before the end of the semester.