My workchums Paul and Colleen have taken pity on me and lent me a copy of this book to help solve my XML woes. It’s a great book, and was produced by mostly the same team as worked on my 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.
Comments
awesome tip
—Mike
I don’t like the fact that while using the T610 you can’t press > (joystick left) to navigate to the submenu of the highlighted menu list object, or
I admit, there are a few major problems with the T68i GUI. I think the ’Turn on Silent’ thing comes from hitting the Power button on Nokias and selecting Silent. I hope it’s that anyway, as otherwise SE are really going to have problems!
Now that XMLSpy - anything like that for a Mac that you would recommend?
http://www.cladonia.com/.
I haven’t tried it myself, but it’s built in Java to run on multiple platforms.
Thanks for the plug! It is a good book, though I must admit, since I am currently using the disgustingly inadequate ASP to code in at the moment, I haven't had an opportunity to actually have any fun with XML and PHP.
One day I will actually leave the office on time and go home to do some real work! heh!
- Paul
Click the Start button and select Turn Off Computer.
You may be interested to know that there is a new release of the Exchanger editor. This release includes better integration with Mac OSX and built-in support for editing XHTML, XSLT, XSLFO, Docbook, SVG, etc.
Features include: Schema Based Editing; Tag Prompting; Validation against DTD, XML Schema and RelaxNG; Tree View and Outliner for Tag Free editing; XPath and Regular expression searches; Schema Viewer and Conversion; XSLT and XSLFO Transformations; Comprehensive Project Management; SVG Viewer and Conversion; Easy SOAP Invocations.