PLEASE NOTE: All CMIT modules have now been withdrawn,
and are unavailable for the 2010/11 academic year
These web pages and lecture notes are left as reference for those students
requiring CMIT modules to complete their programme only, and are not an
indication of modules currently offered.
MIT3112/3212
Assignment
Deadline for proposal of document design: 4 March 2010.
Final submission date for all work: 6 May 2010 (by 12 noon).
Feedback on progress before this date will be given during workshops.
The aim of the assignment is to produce a working document template and the means to display sample documents in different formats.The subject of the documents is open to your choice, but you should think carefully about choosing a class of documents which are well-defined and appropriate to produce in multiple formats. Appropriate choices may include TV-listings, product data, meeting minutes, biographical data, recipes, etc.; i.e. wherever you have a series of documents that follow a fairly well-defined pattern.
Document Design Proposal
A brief proposal of your document design and implementation should be provided by the first deadline; this ensures that you choose an appropriate topic for your assignment. It should be no more than 200 words of descriptive text, preferably in DocBook format, and should be emailed to cmit-submissions@exeter.ac.uk.
Main Project Deliverables
The assignment itself will involve producing:
- A Document Type Definition (10% of the overall mark) which describes the document structure.
- An XML Schema (optionally 10%, may be omitted) equivalent to or extending the DTD.
- A set of sample documents (20%) encoded according to your DTD or Schema. These should illustrate the features and flexibility of your DTD/Schema, and provide suitable material to test the transformations.
- A set of CSS stylesheets and XSL transformations (20%, or 30% if schema is omitted) allowing the document to be viewed in a number of formats or restructuring the data to present summaries or alternate views. A corresponding set of sample outputs illustrating the features of these stylesheets should also be generated (statically or dynamically).
- A report (40%), written in either TEI or DocBook, outlining the design rationale for the document structure and the transformations produced, and detailing possible improvements, user feedback or alternative solutions to your chosen design.
The purpose of the report is to illustrate the design and evolution of your new document standard. It can include initial designs, revisions, and unadopted features where appropriate, and should give clear reasoning behind the document design. It should also point out any features which you wish to particularly bring to the markers' attention, indicating where the programming effort has been put.
Marks will be awarded for the design and coding style as much as for whether the system works technically. All files should be published to your webspace on people.ex.ac.uk in a folder called 'mit3112'; this is essential for our automated backup system to work.
Your complete documentation should also be included on your website, in valid and well-formed DocBook or TEI XML, and should also be submitted in paper form (any diagrams may be hand-drawn if you don't have access to a drawing package). You should also ensure that there is documentation within the templates and transformations in the form of comments where appropriate, to make the purpose of each section clear.
Parts of the assignment may be submitted in draft form for qualitative feedback before the scheduled date; please allow sufficient time for me to look at the work though. It is essential that you discuss your project with me as it progresses, and time will be allocated during the practical classes for this.
All work should be signed in at the CMIT Office (room 151, first floor, Queen's Building) by 12 noon on the day of the deadline.
20 Credits Only (MIT3212)
Choosing one of the following questions, write an essay of approx. 2,000 words in DocBook or TEI format:
- Is XML a necessary evolution of SGML and other document markup languages?
- Do we need document standards? Discuss in relation to the W3C's XML family of markup languages.
- Should browser manufacturers be forced to take document standards more seriously, or should we allow them to modify HTML to suit their own purposes?
- XML is only useful for exchange of information between computers. Is this true?
30 Credits Masters Level (MITM212A)
Project as detailed above, but all documentation must be as TEI document(s).
Essay as for 20 credits above, but of 3,000 words.
Further details are available on the module descriptor.