My workchums Paul and Colleen have taken pity on me and lent me a copy of this book, so that can’t be bad. Goes into a lot of the basics and not-so-basics of XML stuff in PHP on a really practical level. It’s chocked full of code. Nice.

It sparked off a thought that’s been nagging me for a little while – I must learn more about writing DTDs. At the moment I just use XMLSpy to generate DTDs from my XML, but I’m never pleased with the result. It has a tendency to take every value you’ve ever used for an attribute and specify those values as a finite list of options. This works fine – until you specify a different value and then your XML won’t load. Drat. It doesn’t look at all difficult, it’s just that I’ve never bothered to learn. I’m going to learn. W3Schools have a good tutorial on DTDs, so I’ll probably work through that. I pays to know these things inside-out. I like to know these things.

Whilst vaguely on the topic of XMLSpy, I have to say I really love working with a dedicated XML editor, even if XMLSpy itself isn’t so great. The mere fact that the editor will read any DTD you attach and give you code hints based on it is awesome. I love that. You can be authoring an XHTML 1.0 Strict document and it’ll error if you try to use any tags or attributes that aren’t defined in the DTD. If you’ve authored an XHTML document in XMLSpy you can guarantee it’ll validate, because the software continually warns you as you go along. Sweet. All editors should do this.

Anyway, further to yesterday’s post about phones, the reason I dislike my T68i so much is its appalling user interface. Ponder this one thing. To switch the sounds off, you have to select a menu item called “Turn on silent”. That’s soo dumb. It’s not “Turn off sounds”, it’s “Turn on an absence of sound” which is completely obscure. I really hate that – it’s like Ericsson were soo far up their own arse that they couldn’t see that something like “Turn on silent” makes absolutely no sense to a non-technical user, and is pretty insulting to a technical one. That’s just one example, but the whole phone is full of them. Blurgh. Nokia phones are designed with so much more consideration.