EAD is where I live, XML-wise, but I’ve been exposed (xposed?) to other flavors of XML, all related to librarial and archival activity. I have played a little with MARC XML in attempts to map archival accession data; I have also played with a specialized schema that lives for and with the Archivists’ Toolkit project, their accession XML schema. Which leads to one of the questions on the table about extensibility and freedom this week: while I have found the AT schema very useful, granted only in testing, there could be, hypothetically, lots of archival accession schemas developed by lots of busy techn/archivist bees, with plusses and minuses. Do we desire this? (actually, yes! maybe). Ungoverned development of schemas of overlapping utility would not be a good thing if it really fractured community. The AT accession schema is not being marketed beyond the confines of the AT; I could see developing an “application profile” hybrid of the EAD and accession schemas to produce EAD accession records, i.e. “draft” finding aids but with a few distinctly different characteristics to be sure no one took it for final.
Just thinking out loud.
Of the tools at hand for learning XML right now, I find the W3Schools tutorials, as usual, good, quick enough and yet connected enough, with good navigation. I can take just as much as I can take but instantly see what’s related–i.e., learn from their structuring of the topics as well as from the topics. Gee, like a book. I went through the Basic and then scanned through Advanced which I found very interesting. I’m so impressed that they’ve compacted so much into morsels my poor attention span can handle. Topics of interest in particular to me were namespaces and PCDATA/CDATA. Namespaces are of immediate use to me; we have just implemented EAD authoring compliant with the current EAD schema, as opposed to the old DTD, and chose new software (W3C’s choice, XMLSpy, came in second to oXygen). All of this to be able to handle xmlns:xlink. None of this sinks in deeply, but with repetition there may be hope.
I also found the VERY densely-packed 10-minute Youtube presentation by James Pasley GREAT. I agreed wholeheartedly with the reviews. It’s all about the quality.
I went through a great many Mark Long videos and found them good–even the ones I found slow usually had a detail or two that were new to me. I do like submitting to the pace of someone’s voice in learning. His accent helps.
