A Better-Tailored Resource

I thought I had some great news about the exercise files for the InDesign tutorial being compatible with CS4, but it turns out that my computer only thought they were CS4 files, and so I’m unable to make any use of them. I can use the other files that come with it, though, like XML, CSS, and DTD files.

I’m finding it funny that every time I step back and try a new resource, the content is dumbed down just a little more, like each one is more for us “regular people” than the previous. To be honest, I think that’s great. I like it when the narrator reassures me that we’re on the same page as far as goals are concerned (don’t go too crazy with the code, save time in production). The pattern I’ve experienced, as you can probably tell from my previous posts, is that I’ll think a tutorial is really working for me until all of a sudden it feels like relevance has gone out the window. That may very well happen with this one, too; who knows? But it does feel a little more comfortable playing in the familiar territory of InDesign.

I’ve just completed the introductory section, as well as the section called Creating XML, and I am happy to report that I’m finally understanding how I could take data and produce XML files based off of them without hand coding the entire thing. The narrator showed that Office, at least on Windows, can be a powerful tool for taking data (which we often use Office to store and manipulate) and converting it to XML. He also covered Dreamweaver, as well as the category of dedicated XML editors. His suggested editor is oXygen, largely because it’s cross-platform. He encourages that anyone who’s serious about working with XML have a dedicated editor because they have more features and, often, more checks on your work. You could write an entire XML file on something like Notepad or Text Edit and have it be completely invalid because of a small typo or other coding mistake; an editor like oXygen would know to recognize and inform you of errors like that, however, so that you can make the change immediately. I’ve downloaded a free trial of oXygen and have been happy with it so far, more so than I was with BBEdit. I think I’ll stick with this for this tutorial.