As part of my assessment for a college module I’ve been tasked with creating an XML document. For those of you that don’t know XML is one of the lesser used markup languages in website design. As someone who does not come from a computer background this assignment should prove tricky. Over the course of my 5 years in college I’ve had very little exposure to markup languages used in web development. When I was in 4th year I was able to participate in some labs that showed us the basics of HTML and CSS. In truth I found it difficult to understand what was going on in these labs. Seeing such complicated data was a shock to the system! I had always assumed that such technical content was only meant for students studying computer science. It’s no surprise then that I found it difficult to take anything away from these labs as my natural instinct was to panic over how I’ll never be able to understand the content.
Upon hearing that I would have to learn yet another markup language this semester, my reaction was much of the same. I had just started to try and wrap my head around our HTML and CSS labsheets, and now I would have to add another one to the list. However, when researching about CSS and HTML I discovered a youtube account that provided really handy tutorials in both markup languages. I had found him very easy to understand and he helped me to learn the most basic aspects of both languages. It just so happened that the third installment of his tutorial series would deal with XML!! When the assignment brief came out last week I went straight to youtube and watched the third tutorial. Having already looked at CSS and HTML I found it a lot easier than I expected to follow the lesson. I now understand the purpose of using XML and I have a basic knowledge of how it works.
Despite my initial shock when seeing the assignment brief I feel like I’m in a good place to design a good quality XML document. It’s going to take a lot of playing around before I can finalize my document but this is only normal. Over the next week or so I will review the labsheets provided to us and hope that I’m completely up to speed by then. All going well I’ll be confident when designing the final product.
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