Week 6 Reading Notes and Muddiest Points

Reading Note

I'm working my way through the Altova Online Training, part of the Altova XMLSpy software I've signed on for a month's evaluation of. I figure it might be easier to get used to working in XML if I had software to create and edit it in. The verdict is still out, with a host of alphabet-soup initials needed to effectively work with and within the world of XML.

Muddiest Point

In further developing the more involved sections of the metadata for the Chartres Cathedral web collection, we had numerous examples - the Capital Frieze scenes, for one example - where several scenes (carved Biblical scenes on adjoining capital faces) would appear in one of my photographs detailing the Frieze. We were told by the Digital Research Library (DRL) that because our metadata - created in File Maker Pro was eventually converted to XML before launched onto the web, the useful spaces between paragraphs (some scene descriptions were more involved than typical metadata records) were "lost" as you can't include line spaces in XML. Is this true? My metadata for the Cathedral of Notre-Dame and Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, and Abbey Church of Saint-Pere in Chartres will not be particularly involved in the span of this class - though augmented next year - but the resolution of this issue would be helpful, nonetheless for the future.

Saint-Pere de Chartres on Flickr

My 5 photos of Staint-Pere de Chartres - a former abbey church down the hill from Chartres Cathedral - are now up on Flickr. My url is http://www.flickr.com/photos/philipmaye/
Feel free to comment on them, though I've had trouble finding them so far through the site's search engine.