D00m

[bugshaw]

Oh no! My shiny new USB stick comes with Sudoku and Mahjongg games! Luckily they only seem to be visible on the Windows machine. I had quite enough of a shock last night when I found that the third piece of this week's reading for the XML course was a 115-page presentation on XQuery.

Comments

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

If you want I can batch up and send you all my old XML tutorials

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

I'm probably okay with the W3Schools stuff, but am interested in how people use XML in the real world if that's the sort of thing they cover :-)

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Badly, is all too often the answer.

(A colleague decided that XML was a sensible file format for saving data to. So far, so good. Except that instead of saving a string as an attribute in one case, he saves the individual characters, each as a separate sub node. Can we say, file bloat? Can we say, impossible to find a damned string when looking for it?)

[devilgate.livejournal.com]

My jaw is sore from hitting the table.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

I should clarify - not all strings are treated this way, only the strings that provided the text to be displayed for text shapes. These are, of course, the only lengthy strings we need to worry about.

Combine that with an all-on-one-line XML serialisation routine, and it gets difficult to examine the file and determine which text shape is responsible for the misspelt 'SPECAIL OFFER'.

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

Good new everyone! If the XQuery stuff has been written in a nice xmlish way then it should be quite possible to write some XQueries to extract the salient information from the document.

Thus you should assume that you will receive some xqueries from your future self and spend the time you would have used reading those 115 pages to invent a time machine.

I need a Bunsen Honeydew avatar.

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

I am insufficient of a wizard to XQuery a PowerPoint presentation (for that is what it was)...

>I need a Bunsen Honeydew avatar.
The Internet can provide. Who'd have thought?

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

Close, but doesn't really capture his character, there's something about the way he tends to gesticulate.

I might have to trawl Muppet Shows for suitable images. Oh the hardship. :-)

[akicif.livejournal.com]

Open PowerPoint in OpenOffice, save in internal XML format and hit that with XSLT/XQuery?