Week 10: Web Authoring Part 2

Tutorial Exercises

• Can the Web survive without metadata?
  
• Who are the stakeholders and what role should they play in its production and maintenance?
  
• Many metadata schemas for a range of purposes or 'one-schema-fits-all'?
  
• What are the advantages/disadvantages from both a human and machine user perspective of presenting Dublin Core metadata as on http://www.au.dublincore.org/workshops/dc1/?

• Why hasn't XML taken off the way HTML has? Or has it?
  
• What factors are inhibiting its uptake?
  
• Who has most to gain from it? Who has the most to lose?
  
• Let's look at turning the template for the lectures for this subject into an XML document, separating structure from presentation - Discuss in groups of 2-3 and then compare with what others in the class have done. Did you come up with the same thing? How much variation within groups, between groups? What does that say about DTD specification?
  
  

Lab Exercise

• An exercise in creating metadata, working with an HTML file and ftping
  1. Pick an Australasian Science article from here
     
  2. Save it and open in Notepad or other text editor
     
  3. Using Reggie create Dublin Core metadata for your chosen article. (Java needs to be enabled for the applet to work)
     
  4. Copy and paste your Dublin Core metadata into your chosen article - after the TITLE element
     
  5. Save the file and view it in the browser
     
  6. Now compare it to automatically generated metadata using DC dot
     
  7. Report your findings to the WebRAFT folder for this week.
  
  

Review Questions

1. How do you find out the basic author, title, publisher, date information for a Web page if metadata is not used? Can this be applied to all web pages?
   
2. What is XML?
   
3. What is the difference between HTML, XML and SGML?
   
4. What XML support does your browser have? What XML support does Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape's Communicator have? Is this problematic?
   
5. What is XSL?
   
6. What factors are inhibiting the uptake of XML?
   

Articles

• Burnard, Lou., 'Text Encoding for Interchange: A New Consortium', Ariadne, vol. 24, June 2000, UKOLN, 2000, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/tei/.
• Floyd, Michael, 'Blowing XML Bubbles', WebTechniques, Mar 2000, CMP Media Inc, 2000, http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2000/03/xml/.
• Lagoze, Carl, 'Keeping Dublin Core Simple: Cross-Domain Discovery or Resource Description?', D-Lib Magazine, vol. 7, no. 1, January 2001, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january01/lagoze/01lagoze.html.
• Medeiros, Norm, 'XML and the Resource Description Framework: The Great Web Hope', Online, September 2000, Online Inc, 2000, http://www.onlinemag.net/OL2000/medeiros9.html.
• Thomas, Charles F. and Griffin, Linda S., 'Who Will Create Metadata for the Internet?', First Monday, vol. 3, no. 12, University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago, December 1998, http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_12/index.html.
• Weibel, Stuart L. and Traugott Koch, 'The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative: Mission, Current Activities, and Future Directions', D-Lib Magazine, vol. 6, no. 12, Corporation for National Research Initiatives, December 2000, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december00/weibel/12weibel.html.

Reports

• Bray, Tim, The Annotated XML Specification, XML.com, 1998, http://www.xml.com/axml/axml.html.
• Davidow, Ari, XML: In search of a good editor, 12 October 1999, http://www.ivritype.com/xml/.

Resources

• The World Wide Web Consortium, W3C, 1994, http://www.w3.org/.
• XML.com, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 2000, http://www.xml.com/.
• Cover, Robin, The XML Cover Pages, Oasis, 1994, http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/.
• Flynn, Peter (editor), The XML FAQ, v.2.1 edn, University College, Cork, 2002, http://www.ucc.ie:8080/cocoon/xmlfaq.
• National Library of Australia, Meta Matters, National Library of Australia, 1999, http://www.nla.gov.au/meta/.

Resource Sections

• Berners-Lee, Tim, 'Metadata Architecture', in Design Issues, W3C, 1997, http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Metadata.html.
• Cunningham, Adrian, 'Enabling Seamless Online Access To Government', in Australian Government Locator Service, National Archives of Australia, 1998, http://www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/gov_online/agls/Metadata_paper22sept98.html.

• Fischer, Peter, 'Migrating from HTML to XML', Webtechniques, July 2000, CMP Media Inc, 2000, http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2000/07/fischer/.
• Floyd, Michael, 'Separating Body from Soul: XML Makes Changing Easy', WebTechniques, July 2000, CMP Media Inc, 2000, http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2000/07/floyd/.