so far, i did not have a really good idea for examples and exercises for my xml course. in the fall 2006 edition of the xml foundations course, students were asked to build there own home page in xml, and then first style it with css and later transform it to html. and of course they also had to come up with a dtd and a schema. but i never really liked this use case, i simply used it because i could not think of anything better.
in the program of the 2007 extreme markup languages conference, i have now found a very good idea, anne brüggemann-klein will report on Principles, patterns, and procedures of XML schema design; Reporting from the XBlog project
, and while i have no idea what this talk will present, the idea of using a blog as a use case for xml was just what i needed.
so for my fall 2007 edition of the xml foundations course, i will use a blog as an example, and this even translates very nicely into the one new subject of the course, xml databases and xquery. and when xquery and xpath full-text becomes available, this will still be a very good example.
of course, i have still to work out the details and i am looking forward to reading anne's paper, but i am very confident that this scenario will provide a perfect combination of a useful and challenging application of xml technologies, and enough instant gratification and opportunities to do cool stuff to keep students engaged.
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