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Beyond Schemas: Planning Your XML Model Jennifer Linton Published by O'Reilly Media (Short Cut) ISBN:0-596-52770-5 41 pages £ $ 9.99 Published: February 12th 2007 reviewed by Lindsay Marshall    in the June 2007 issue (pdf), (html)

OK, this is a weird one. [No, it's not, it's an O'Reilly ``Short Cut'' (see Mike Smith's review above) -- ed.] I didn't even realise it was for review: I thought it was some kind of marketing material or something. It was in a cardboard O'Reilly folder and printed single-sided on 41 sheets of A4 paper. It looks for all the world like a bit of student coursework. If students knew anything about layout and could manage to stretch to more than 5 or 6 pages.

As you will no doubt have guessed I was immediately put off by the use of the word ``schemas''. The plural of schema is schemata. The writing style is a bit undergraduate too, but wait! The author understands about the different categories of users that you can encounter. Things are looking better. But then, one after the other, there are four small pictures of spreadsheets which, though in reality not the same, look pretty much the same apart from the caption. These spreadsheets are supposed to help you set up an information model, but it is not entirely clear to me how.

Suddenly we are doing formal things with documents and even little flurries of XML-ish things. I think I know what is supposed to be going on but I am not confident. I've backtracked a bit because I did think this was going to help me with the perennial problem in XML: what goes in as tags and what goes in as attributes; but reading through again there is no magic bullet just an assertion that the metadata will have been found during my user study.

Now the author is developing some persona and some scenarios. Always an excellent idea but I am less than convinced by the way that she extracts metadata from them. And then suddenly it is about naming schemes and we're at the end.

In reality, I think that there is a really good example of how to create XML representations from existing material buried somewhere in these few pages, but it seems quite well hidden. It all seems much to condensed and there are lots of assumptions and things that are skimmed over. They want 10 bucks for this, and it feels like one of those PDFs that you download from the net that doesn't quite meet your needs.

I'll have to think about this one -- I really don't know what to say!

Back to reviews list

(the UK's Unix & Open Systems User Group)

Home

Events

About UKUUG

UKUUG Diary

Membership

Book Discounts

Other Discounts

Mailing lists

Sponsors

Newsletter

Consulting

Beyond Schemas: Planning Your XML Model Jennifer Linton Published by O'Reilly Media (Short Cut) ISBN:0-596-52770-5 41 pages £ $ 9.99 Published: February 12th 2007 reviewed by Lindsay Marshall    in the June 2007 issue (pdf), (html)

OK, this is a weird one. [No, it's not, it's an O'Reilly ``Short Cut'' (see Mike Smith's review above) -- ed.] I didn't even realise it was for review: I thought it was some kind of marketing material or something. It was in a cardboard O'Reilly folder and printed single-sided on 41 sheets of A4 paper. It looks for all the world like a bit of student coursework. If students knew anything about layout and could manage to stretch to more than 5 or 6 pages.

As you will no doubt have guessed I was immediately put off by the use of the word ``schemas''. The plural of schema is schemata. The writing style is a bit undergraduate too, but wait! The author understands about the different categories of users that you can encounter. Things are looking better. But then, one after the other, there are four small pictures of spreadsheets which, though in reality not the same, look pretty much the same apart from the caption. These spreadsheets are supposed to help you set up an information model, but it is not entirely clear to me how.

Suddenly we are doing formal things with documents and even little flurries of XML-ish things. I think I know what is supposed to be going on but I am not confident. I've backtracked a bit because I did think this was going to help me with the perennial problem in XML: what goes in as tags and what goes in as attributes; but reading through again there is no magic bullet just an assertion that the metadata will have been found during my user study.

Now the author is developing some persona and some scenarios. Always an excellent idea but I am less than convinced by the way that she extracts metadata from them. And then suddenly it is about naming schemes and we're at the end.

In reality, I think that there is a really good example of how to create XML representations from existing material buried somewhere in these few pages, but it seems quite well hidden. It all seems much to condensed and there are lots of assumptions and things that are skimmed over. They want 10 bucks for this, and it feels like one of those PDFs that you download from the net that doesn't quite meet your needs.

I'll have to think about this one -- I really don't know what to say!

Back to reviews list