S656: Assignment One
Description
Develop a DTD and encode an instance XML document for the sample document provided in class. DTD element declarations should make use of sequence and occurrence indicators.Sample Document
The sample document you will be using for this exercise is a section from the book The Facts and Backgrounds of Literature: English and American by George Fullmer Reynolds and Garland Greever (The Century Co.: 1920). The book is available on Google Books at http://books.google.com/books?id=s1odAAAAMAAJ. Work with the section on the writer Thomas Carlyle that begins on page 192. Look at the section on other authors. They all follow a similar format. Try to come up with a DTD that would work for any author in the book, then use your DTD to encode your document. Code the structure and content, not the formatting. Think about units of texts as chunks of data. What are these strings of text? You will encounter dates, names, titles, lists, etc. Design your DTD accordingly. Although you are encoding the structure and content, not the formatting, keep in mind that at some point you will want to style this document. If you want to style a string of text, it should probably have a tag around it, or the text should be an attribute value. You need a “hook” on which to hang your style. But your tag should not describe how the text looks; it should describe what it is. You may find it useful to encode the document first, or at least give it a start, to learn about the structure of the document. Then work from that sample encoding to develop your DTD. The document includes an image, which I've captured and made available below, in case you want to do something clever with the image file in your encoding:
Figure 1.
Image of Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner, from page 195 of The Facts and Backgrounds of Literature: English and American by George Fullmer Reynolds and Garland Greever (The Century Co.: 1920)