Teaching HTML5

 Presentations, XML  2 Responses »
Aug 272013
 

For the XML Sum­mer School this year, I’m teach­ing about HTML5, CSS3 and ePub in the Hands-on Web Pub­lish­ing course. The basic premise of the course is to show what tech­no­lo­gies are involved in tak­ing a bunch of Word doc­u­ments or XML files and turn­ing them into a decent-look­ing web­site or ePub. The course includes les­sons on rel­ev­ant bits of XSLT trans­form­a­tion (since Word is XML under the cov­ers, if you dig deeply enough), script­ing in Ruby to auto­mate as much as pos­sible, and, of course, enough inform­a­tion about HTML and CSS that people can make a decent-look­ing web­site in class in the hands-on part.

As a start­ing point for the exer­cises, we’ll use a gen­er­ated tem­plate from HTML5 boil­er­plate, since, if you pick the right options, it is rel­at­ively clean and simple to under­stand. Look­ing at the cur­rent com­mon design prac­tices used across a num­ber of options (HTML5 boil­er­plate, Boot­strap, Word­Press tem­plates for example) coupled with web com­pon­ents and the sheer size and num­ber of HTM­L5-related spe­cific­a­tions from WHATWG and the W3C, I’m won­der­ing just how much more com­plic­ated it can all get before the pen­du­lum starts swinging back again towards sim­pli­city and sep­ar­a­tion of con­tent from pro­cessing. Even a bare-bones tem­plate has a num­ber of lines in it to deal with older ver­sions of IE, or to load some JavaS­cript or (mostly) jQuery lib­rary. It’s no won­der we’re start­ing to see so many frame­works that try to cov­er up all of that com­plex­ity (Boot­strap again, or Ember, for example). 

In the mean­time, at least I have a reas­on­ably con­strained use case to help me decide which of the myri­ad pos­sib­il­it­ies are worth spend­ing time teach­ing, and which are best left for the del­eg­ates to read up on after the class. 

XML Summer School 2009

 Conference  No Responses »
Nov 202009
 

The XML Sum­mer School in Oxford at the end of Septem­ber was the usu­al mix of inter­est­ing present­a­tions, punt­ing, good dis­cus­sions in the pubs, and wan­der­ing around old build­ings. The pho­tos I took have none of the first, little of the last, and an over-pro­por­tion­al num­ber of punt­ing and pubs, mostly because that’s when the cam­era did its job best. These are all part of the XML Sum­mer School 2009 group on Flickr, if you want more pho­tos of that week in Oxford.

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Gearing up for Oxford

 Conference  No Responses »
Sep 042009
 

This year the XML Sum­mer School in Oxford is at the end of Septem­ber, rather a change from pre­vi­ous years, when it was in July. This morn­ing on the organ­ising call we decided that we need to go punt­ing on the Monday before din­ner rather than after din­ner, since the even­ings will be dark soon­er, but that’s about the only draw­back to the late-sum­mer timing. 

Apart from being heav­ily involved in organ­ising the event, I’m chair­ing two courses this year. There’s Trends and Tran­si­ents, a fun day with lots of dis­cus­sion and debate about hyped, over-hyped, and cur­rent tech­no­logy issues. This year we have Tony Coates talk­ing about how XML could have saved us from the cur­rent fin­an­cial crisis (some­what tongue-in-cheek), Paul Downey rant­ing on what’s wrong with Rich Inter­net Applic­a­tions, and Rich Salz telling you what to look for and avoid in cloud com­put­ing. The day is capped off by uncon­fer­ence ses­sions in the even­ing where every­one gets to have their say in as much length as people will listen to them. 

New this year is the oth­er course I’m chair­ing, the Semant­ic Tech­no­lo­gies course, where Bob DuCh­arme, Leigh Dodds, Andy Seaborne, and Duncan Hull are join­ing forces to teach classes in Linked Data, OWL, RDF, SPARQL, and all those oth­er acronyms that are form­ing the basis of what some people are call­ing Web 3.0. I’m look­ing for­ward to catch­ing up on what’s new in all of these, and fig­ur­ing out wheth­er some might be use­ful for a pro­ject I have in mind.

I haven’t decided which oth­er courses and classes I’ll sit in on yet; they all look good.

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