DailyNotes/2004/08/30 - Raymond Yee's Wiki

Wikis and blogs in higher education

EDUCAUSE REVIEW | September/October 2004, Volume 39, Number 5: The articles on blogging and wikis and other high tech goodies in a higher ed context should be useful supporting documentation for us, specifically, answering the question of why hooking into weblogs and wikis is a timely strategy. Articles include:

We have been interested in blogging for years and wikis for a bit over a year. In the early days of our experimentation, others would have seen our wikis and blogs as being just too far out there to be interesting. That situation is quickly changing.

Transforming Scholar's Box collections

I've been getting back into working directly on the ScholarsBox code. The ScholarsBox can yield XML-representation of its collections. For example, DailyNotes/2004/06/29/MiloszCollection was produced with ScholarsBox. (BTW, the collection is not currently encoded in any standard XML format. We are still working on either settling on a widely used standard, such as Rss10Spec, Rss20Spec, AtomProject, etc. We will use our ad hoc encoding and evolve it as we go. Related discussion at BibliographicCitation.)

Before trying to settle on an exact XML format, I decided to start figuring out ways to:

display the collections (as HTMl, for example)
make it easier to reuse the collection

I have spent a fair amount of time today studying the use of XSLT to transform ScholarsBox collections into HTML. HTML 4.01 or XHTML (strict or transitional) -- I'm trying to figure out which one.

I have not worked with XSLT for a while, so I decided to make a list of XSLT I have written. It's good to have easy access so that I can do more work easily:

I've been working on SBCollectionToHtmlXslt, some XSLT to transform DailyNotes/2004/06/29/MiloszCollection into (X)HTML. Right now, it is geared to producing XHTML 1.0 transitional. However, I've been trying to get the details around XHTML right. So I'm working with my sample XHTML page: /SampleXhtmlPage, which seems to be ok -- it validates as XHTML 1.0 transitional.

A tricky issue is getting the mimetype right. MarkPilgrim wrote in XML.com: The Road to XHTML 2.0: MIME Types:

Now here's a dirty little secret: browsers aren't actually treating your XHTML as XML. Your validated, correctly DOCTYPE'd, completely standards compliant XHTML markup is being treated as if it were still HTML with a few weird slashes in places they don't belong (like <br /> and <img />).

I started wondering about whether to go for XHTML 1.0 or stick with HTML 4.x. A key point from MarkPilgrim -- XML.com: The Road to XHTML 2.0: MIME Types:

It can be difficult to get JavaScript to work properly in both HTML and XML modes. This is a short-term problem (XHTML 2.0 only has one mode: XML), but it's a serious one. If you use any JavaScript on your pages now, you may be better off waiting to make the jump to XHTML 2.0 all at once, rather than migrating slowly.

Moreover, I noticed that MarkPilgrim's blog produces HTML 4.01 and not XHTML -- so I'm wondering why he has decided not to go the XHTML route.

So, at this point, I think that my next steps is to produce HTML 4.01 first and come back to looking at getting details around XHTML 1.0 right. Some pointers to help in that endeavour:

Better Living Through XHTML: A List Apart -- an argument for the advantages of XHTML.
XHTML media type test - results -- I can see how various incarnations of (X)HTML show up in various browsers; also points to XHTML media type test, which has test data for testing various mimetypes.
XHTML Transitional, Strict - What's the Difference? - Brainstorms and Raves-

I want to see whether I get the same types of effects if I copy Sample XHTML 1.0 document to /SampleXhtml2:

text/html: works
application/xhtml+xml: works....because of the CSS?

Mozilla and WSDL

The Mozilla WSDL Example worked for me. I guess the WSDL support in FireFoxBrowser looks promising. More info at Mozilla and Web Services.