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COMP249 Web Technology

Tutorial - Week 10

Answer the following questions and hand in your answers in a text file (Notepad .txt) via WebCT before 9am Tuesday, May 13th, 2008.

1. Here is one possible XML encoding of some unit information from last week:

   <?xml version = "1.0"?>
   <unitlist>
      <unit>
        <unitname>COMP249</unitname>
        <tutorial>
           <day>Tuesday</day>
           <time>1700</time>
           <location>E6A133</location>
        </tutorial>
        <tutorial>
           <day>Wednesday</day>
           <time>1000</time>
           <location>E6A123</location>
        </tutorial>
        ...
      </unit>
   </unitlist>		  
   

   Write XPath expressions to access:

   1. All of the tutorial locations.
   2. The unitname of tutorials in E6A133.
   3. Tutorials in E6A113.
   4. The time of the first tutorial on Monday.

   You may want to refer to W3Schools XPath tutorial for some pointers.

2. Here is an example of an RSS file (taken from here). Write some CSS rules that would allow it to be displayed nicely in a web browser. (Note that Firefox and IE7 already display RSS feeds nicely if they don't have an associated stylesheet, we want to provide our own look).

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
   <rss version="2.0">
     <channel>
       <title>Engaging Students</title>
       <link>http://www.cpd.mq.edu.au/teaching/engage/</link>
       <description>Macquarie University's Podcast
       on Student Engagement</description>
       <generator>iWeb 1.1.2</generator>
       <image>
         <url>http://www.cpd.mq.edu.au/teaching/engage/images/logo3.jpg</url>
         <title>Engaging Students</title>
         <link>http://www.cpd.mq.edu.au/teaching/engage/images/logo3.jpg</link>
       </image>
        <item>
         <title>Judy Lattas - Student Engagement</title>
         <link>http://www.cpd.mq.edu.au/teaching/engage/lattas/</link>
         <guid>http://www.cpd.mq.edu.au/teaching/engage/lattas/</guid>
         <pubDate>Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:51:53 +1000</pubDate>
         <description>&lt;a
         href="http://www.cpd.mq.edu.au/teaching/engage/podcast/engage001.mp3"&gt;&lt;img
         src="http://www.cpd.mq.edu.au/teaching/engage/images/jlattas.jpg"
         style="float:left;"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;In this interview,
         Associate Dean of Learning and Teaching (SCMP), Judy Lattas
         talks about the importance of engaged students, the nature of
         active learning, the student as researcher and much
         more.</description>
         <enclosure url="http://www.cpd.mq.edu.au/teaching/engage/podcast/engage001.mp3"
         length="7050581" type="audio/mpeg" />
       </item>
       <item>
         <title>Engaging Students in Online Discussion - Mitch Parsell</title>
         <link>http://www.cpd.mq.edu.au/teaching/engage/parsell/</link>
         <guid>http://www.cpd.mq.edu.au/teaching/engage/parsell/</guid>
         <pubDate>Wed, 10 Oct 2007 13:51:53 +1000</pubDate>
         <description>&lt;a
         href="http://www.cpd.mq.edu.au/teaching/engage/podcast/engage002.mp3"&gt;&lt;img
         src="http://www.cpd.mq.edu.au/teaching/engage/images/mparsell.jpg"
         style="float:left;"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;Mitch Parsell, from the
         Department of Philosophy and the Centre for Professional
         Development, talks about provoking student discussion in
         online forums.</description>
         <enclosure url="http://www.cpd.mq.edu.au/teaching/engage/podcast/engage002.mp3"
         length="7050581" type="audio/mpeg" />
       </item>
     </channel>
   </rss>
   

2. Additional Topics

Additional topics for discussion in the tutorial (not for handing in):

• How do you link a CSS stylesheet to an XML document?

• We would like to write an XSLT stylesheet to transform this data into an XHTML table such as the following:

  COMP249
  Tutorial	Tuesday	1700	E6A133
  ...	...	...	...

  Here's a template for the unit element that creates the overall table:

  <xsl:template match="unit">
    <table>
      <xsl:apply-templates/> 
    </table>
  </xsl:template>
        

  Write templates for unitname and tutorial to generate the header and body rows for the table (Note, unitname is relatively easy, tutorial is slightly harder).

  In doing this, remember that to get the contents of the current element you just use while to get the contents of some other element you use where xxx is an xpath expression for the thing you want.

• How do you access multiple XML documents in XSLT?
• What are the advantages/disadvantages of processing XSLT on the server using an XSLT processor such as SAXON?
• What are the alternatives to XSLT?

Comments to: comp249-admin@ics.mq.edu.au