Suggested Exercises (Feel free to add ideas) [June 6, 2012, 12:17 p.m.]
For those of you with some XSLT experience and even for those of us who just have a reference book and some websites to look through lets start planning some tasks and exercises on this page and then we can break them out into individual tasks. If you have seen a good exercise somewhere linkable, please add a link. If it is from the Tennison book, add the chap/section it is in. If you are ready to create a task out of it, go right ahead and start a new task. Please try and add the XSLT syntax and semantics needed to complete the task if you know.
Themes
The Jeni Tennison book uses a web based TV guide as a theme for all the exercises. I wonder if we can use various forms of processing XML learning documents as our theme. CNXML, DocBook and OUXML would be great to work with and practical at least for the oerpub team folks. Other themes folks are interested in?
Beginning exercise/task ideas
- Hello world -- well I actually included that on "Set up tools".
- Match templates vs. name templates
- Axes and XPath basics
- Params and variables
Intermediate exercise ideas
- "Recursion" using called name templates
Adanced exercises, challenges, and projects
- Use new found XSLT skills to transform this course to a collection on Connexions! Can use cnx.oerpub.org as a starting point.
- Use skills to translate back and forth between CNXML and HTML5 marked up isomorphically with CNXML. And transform THML5 to HTML4 for older browsers.
- Muenchian method for grouping. This uses keys which, at least to me (Max), always make my brain hurt when trying to get my head around them.
- "Walker" modes for converting Word/GDoc headers into sections that wrap content.
- Convert OUXML interactive exercises to HTML5 and to CNXML using CNXML's enhancement features. See http://labspace.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=71682