[thelist] All the talk about HTML

[WapIndia]

the thread there some time back about HTML hand coders being really in
demand raise my hopes.  I thought I was getting obsolete.

now is there is way i can convince people to give me a job without seeing my
face... i mean would they trust me?
and is there a way i can send them the work and get paid... i mean can i
trust them?

i am really interested in doing this HTML work.  and i do have puh-len-tee
of time on my hands.

<tip author="wapindia" subject="xml" type="info">
xml is a standard... what you want to learn is:
1. how to write a DTD.  this is basically specifying what things can be
present in a document, in what order.  for example in a resume, you can have
a name, contact, qualifications and workex.  qualification contains many
entries, each entry contains year, university, course, grade.  similarly
workex contains many entries, each contains year, company, position and pay.
now you should look at things like what tags are needed, whether the tags
need to come in a particular order, whether the start and end tags are
compulsory, whether they tags have attributes.  From all this information,
you come up with DTD.  HTML is specified as a DTD using SGML.

2. parsing APIs.  this is basically the set of functions you need to parse
XML documents.  there are two models here, SAX parses the XML as a stream.
just like you would run your finger through a row of books till you found
the one you wanted.  DOM reads in the whole XML file and creates an
in-memory object which you can manipulate.  just like you put together a
jigsaw puzzle and the look at it.

once you can write DTDs, and figure out how to parse them, then you can
write applications which do something with the XML data.  For e.g. convert
the XML to HTML, or WML, or even PS or PDF, process the data somehow like
you would with a database.

hope this clears up things a bit. and pays for the shameless bid for work.
</tip>

regards

kinjal