Homework this work was rather tricky – transforming XMLSchema into a tree grammar representation using XQuery. Sounds simple enough, but I now feel a certain revulsion, maybe even extending as far as hatred, towards XQuery. To be honest, I think it’s got a lot to do with the fact that XQuery is a functional language, and I’m new to the whole functional thing. It feels a little like programming by explosion… Towards the deadline, I think I was starting to get the hang of it. You just have to think a little… differently. Unfortunately, it took too long for me to figure this out and get the homework assignment done, so we had to hand in a partially complete assignment. Not liking that much.
On the menu today: More tree grammar stuff, including algorithms to validate an instance document against a grammar, Schematron (a rule-based document validation language) and XSugar – all of which have more homework assignments set. No time for more blogging, too much work to do!
Paul Brabban Computer Science, MSc MSc, xquery
Woah.
It always worries me a little when the greek symbols come out. So far, we’ve pretty much avoided them in the Semi-Structured Data and the Web course, so to see them today, whilst not really unexpected, did make my heart sink a little. Read more…
Paul Brabban Computer Science, MSc css, dtd, error, html, schema, validation, xhtml, xml
So, after little snow towards the end of the week, it pelted down on Sunday night, leaving the pavements and roads like an ice rink at 6am – I only narrowly avoided sliding down the hill to the tram stop on my backside. It’s at times like this I’m very glad of my thermos mug of tea!
Scheduling around last week’s coursework didn’t go perfectly – we ended up working til late on the Sunday night to finish off the last bits. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to meet up with my groupmate last week as it was quite late in the day before we actually sorted out the group assignments. It would have been handy to meet up and get a plan of attack together for the week’s coursework, and we were – perhaps – a little uncoordinated. That said, we just about made it, and everything got in on time. 08:55, for a 9am deadline kind of on-time, that is. Read more…
Paul Brabban Computer Science, MSc namespace, schema, xml, xpath, xquery