Master Class at Learning Solutions Conference 2011
By Darron | Best Practices, Development Tools, machine translation | One comment so far
I’ll be conducting a Master Class at Learning Solutions Conference 2011. I have a few ideas about what I’d like to share with everyone, but I’d like to know what other attendees feel is relevant. So I’m asking–what do you want to hear about from me? A couple of my thoughts include comparisons between various rapid development software and effectively using HTML markup inside XML. There’s also the possibility of talking about the value (and limitations) of Google Translate.
I’d love to hear back from you all, especially those planning to attend the conference, about what topics are of most interest.
Website HTML in XML CDATA – How To
By Darron | Best Practices, Development Tools | No comment yet
Pushing HTML markup through XML is a common way to leverage the power of XML containers while getting the style you hope for. This “how to” shows one example of how to do just that on a Flash website containing Windows Phone 7 e-learning modules.
CDATA encapsulation for HTML inside XML
By Darron | Best Practices | One comment so far
If you’ve ever needed to get HTML markup into XML, you know that the markup can confuse the XML parser when trying to validate or just read text into the intended application. Here’s an example of what this confusing, embedded HTML markup might look like:
<xmltag><p>Some <b>bold</b> paragraph text.</p></xmltag>
The parser gets confused because XML uses tags in much the same way that HTML does. Instead of recognizing the HTML markup for what it is intended to be, the parser interprets it as XML syntax. That yields some undesired results.
You can avoid this by escaping your HTML markup, but that can get pretty messy:
<xmltag><p>Some <b>bold</b> paragraph text.</p></xmltag>
You can also simply encapsulate your HTML markup with CDATA:
<xmltag><![CDATA[<p>Some <b>bold</b> paragraph text.</p>]]></xmltag>
That format is much easier to deal with visually, it renders as expected and it parses the XML correctly.
