XML

Discuss briefly how you went about learning XML and which resources you used. Comment briefly on how helpful they were and indicate any intermediate or advanced modules or sections you reviewed.

This week we looked at XML. I had heard of it but never paid attention to what it was. I read all the links in the lecture which helped me immensely. The w3school tutorial was most helpful as it was easy to read and moved slowly (I was able to keep up and understand). The DTD and XML Schema were a little harder to understand. But I will go back and reread them for better comprehension. The Introduction to XML by Mark Long was also very informative and easy to listen to and view. I am a visual learner so the screenshots were most valuable to my learning. I did look at the intermediate modules from w3schools but my eyes started glossing over trying to remember all the vocabulary. I did the first three sections on the UACBT site; Welcome Info, XML Basics, and XML Documents. This gave me a grasp on XML and I look forward to learning more.
After doing the tutorials, the two articles in the lecture had a greater meaning for me. Roy Tennant wrote "By its very nature, MARC is flat, whereas a table of contents is hierarchical" in his article "MARC Must Die". This made sense to me and I can see how stiff MARC is and how flexible XML is.

As stated in XML, a Choice or Replacement, "Due to Unicode and platform neutrality, XML offers the greatest promise of data longevity (or future-proofing), as hardware, software, and network protocols continue to change." using XML will help keep libraries in the forefront of the information highway.