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. 

Coding Fun

 Conference, Technology  No Responses »
Aug 222012
 

A large part of my decision to move back to tech­nic­al work, and less pro­ject man­age­ment, was due to how much fun it was last year work­ing on the web applic­a­tions course for the XML Sum­mer School. And now it’s that time of year again to brush up on my cod­ing for this year’s ver­sion. For­tu­nately, although I’m run­ning a bit late in my pre­par­a­tions, Matt has done ster­ling work get­ting the code base work­ing, and Norm and Paul are doing their bits too.

This is all very dif­fer­ent to the health­care doc­u­ment ana­lys­is I’ve been doing recently, so I need to refresh my memory on Ruby, Sinatra, OAu­th, and co, as well as catch up on recent changes (in par­tic­u­lar to OAuth2, which finally made it to RFC not so long ago). Last year I worked through Singing with Sinatra; this year I get to see what Matt did for our XML web pub­lish­ing applic­a­tion (tak­ing XML files, con­vert­ing to HTML for browser view­ing, adding vari­ous webby bells and whistles) before the del­eg­ates do.

I’m mostly talk­ing about the secur­ity and iden­tity aspects of web sites (as well as help­ing out on the oth­er sec­tions), with the stated aim of mak­ing every­one para­noid enough to be care­ful. The hack­ers are get­ting more soph­ist­ic­ated these days, which means web­site coders have to be more careful.

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.

Summer of XML

 Conference  1 Response »
Apr 212009
 

One of my cur­rent pro­jects is as Course Dir­ect­or for the revamped XML Sum­mer School in Oxford, Eng­land. John Chel­som asked me to help out and I was only too happy to say yes; I have many fond memor­ies from pre­vi­ous years. It will be more a late-sum­mer school this year, being from Septem­ber 20–25, but that does free up more of the sum­mer prop­er for oth­er things, not to men­tion giv­ing us more time to fig­ure out the sched­ule and speakers. 

Anoth­er advant­age of late sum­mer for the XML Sum­mer School is that it does­n’t clash with Bal­is­age in Mon­tréal, Canada, which is on August 11–14 (with the sym­posi­um on pro­cessing XML effi­ciently on the 10th). Papers for that are due on April 24, so you don’t have much time to get them in if you’re plan­ning on speak­ing. Any markup-related top­ic is wel­come, as long as it is of suf­fi­cient qual­ity and depth.

It’s inter­est­ing com­par­ing the two — Bal­is­age is a geek’s con­fer­ence, unapo­lo­get­ic­ally aimed at people who are think deeply about the issues, even if they’re not apply­ing them at work. The XML Sum­mer School is more like train­ing, aimed at less expert prac­ti­tion­ers of and new­comers to XML, and more likely to be atten­ded by people who want to go back to work the next week and apply what they’ve learned dir­ectly. A few of the speak­ers are the same, of course, and the dis­cus­sions over din­ner tend to veer in some of the same directions. 

And, of course, both con­fer­ences are on Twit­ter; Bal­is­age at http://twitter.com/Balisage and the XML Sum­mer School at http://twitter.com/xmlsummerschool.

Summer in Oxford

 Conference, Travel  1 Response »
Jun 272007
 

Most years I get to speak at the XML Sum­mer School put on by CSW in late July in Oxford, Eng­land. Last year I did­n’t go since I’d just had a baby 6 weeks before and the fam­ily suc­ceeded in talk­ing me out of it. This year I’m going again. It should be a lot of fun; the idea of the school is to get a bunch of experts as teach­ers who go along with the attendees to all the social events, so the attendees can ask ques­tions while every­one is in the pub or wan­der­ing around the Old Bodlei­an Lib­rary. Ques­tions while punt­ing are best not dir­ec­ted at the punter, of course, and the rest of us are usu­ally too busy laugh­ing anyway.

With ses­sions on web ser­vices (includ­ing iden­tity and secur­ity), con­tent and know­ledge with XML, XSLT, XSL-FO and XQuery, Teach Your­self Onto­logy (that one’s new this year!), Build­ing XML Applic­a­tions, and XML in Health­care, there’s lots to choose from. I’ll have to choose which days I attend care­fully, there’s always too much going on.

I’m speak­ing in the Trends and Tran­si­ents track (which I chair each year, even when I’m not there) with Jeni Ten­nison and Dan Con­nolly; I’m talk­ing about Web 2.0 while they’re talk­ing XML Pro­cessing and Micro­formats respect­ively. I even got my present­a­tion deck fin­ished, and only a couple of days late! For the last ses­sion of the day, I get the oth­er track chairs to spend five minutes telling us what they think are this year’s hyped or under-appre­ci­ated tech­no­lo­gies, fol­lowed by a pan­el ses­sion of all the day’s speak­ers. There is always some con­tro­versy around people’s opin­ions, even of these sup­posedly dry tech­nic­al sub­jects. For a sample, check out the You­Tube video of Bob DuCh­arme’s talk (rant?) last year (the video and sound qual­ity’s not great, but adequate).

CSW is offer­ing a spe­cial deal this year, speak­ers get a spe­cial code that people can use for a dis­count on regis­tra­tion. So if you are think­ing of attend­ing, email me for the code, either at my Sun email address or my Tex­tu­al­ity email address. Unless you’ve already got a code from one of the oth­er speak­ers of course… 

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