Study these examples of advice.

You can use the modal verb should:

1. Your navigation system should be based on text links.

You can use an imperative:

2. Avoid frames wherever possible. 3. Don’t change the location of your navigation elements.

Note that avoid is followed by the -ing form. For example:

4. Avoid using frames.

Had better is for advice which is close to a warning. It indicates something unpleasant will happen if the advice is not taken:

5. If you’re committed to using frames on your site, you’d better commit yourself to extra work too.

Other ways to give advice are:

6. I recommend Jennifer Fleming’s Web Navigation. 7. It’s a good idea to visit a few larger sites.

To make advice more persuasive, you can add the reason for your advice. For example:

It’s a good idea to visit a few larger sites [advice] to get some ideas on designing an effective site map [reason].

Give advice on these aspects of navigation design. Add reasons for your advice where possible.

1. text links, 2. graphical buttons, 3. ALT text captions, 4. site map, 5. frames, 6. position of navigation elements, 7. logical links, 8. search function, 9. number of links on a page.

 

Give advice on these features of free Internet Service Providers.

1. Sign up software on CD-ROM, 2. Local call rates for online time, 3. National call rates for online time, 4. Initial set-up fee, 5. Web-based mail, 6. POP3 email, 7. Free Web space, 8. Access to newsgroups, 9. Customer support, 10. Reliable service, 11. Multiple ISP accounts.

 

Level A. Render the information.

Level B. Make up a dialogue on the text.

Level C. Read and translate the text.

XML Takes on HTML

1. Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) is the language that spawned¹ both HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and XML (extensible² Markup³ Language). 2. SGML is not a true language, it is a metalanguage, which is a language from which you can create other languages. 3. In this case, it is the creation of a markup language (a system of encoded instructions for structuring and formatting electronic document elements).

4. HTML is an application-specific derivation of SGML. 5. It is a set of codes, generally used for webpages, that creates electronic documents according to rules established by SGML. 6. HTML is a language that is all about the presentation of your information, not what the actual data are. 7. You can, therefore, say that HTML is a presentation language.

8. XML is a subset of SGML, but it is also, like SGML a metalanguage. 9. XML defines a specific method for creating text formats for data so that files are program independent, platform independent, and support internationalisation. 10. In fact, because XML is an extensible language, you don’t even have to have a browser to interpret the page. 11. Applications can parse the XML document and read the information without any human intervention.

12. XML, unlike HTML, is concerned with the identity, meaning and structure of data. 13. XML is extensible because it lets website developers create their own set of customised⁴ tags for documents. 14. This ability to define your own tags is the main feature of XML, and it is what gives developers more flexibility.

15. By defining your own markup tags, you can explicitly⁵ define the content in the document. 16. This makes XML a more intelligent markup language than HTML. 17. For example, in HTML, you could have a paragraph tag <p> preceding a paragraph about baseball. 18. Your Web browser sees this tag and knows to present the following text as a paragraph. 19. All your browser knows about the text, however, is that it is text; it doesn’t know that it is specifically about baseball. 20. In an XML document, you could define a <BASEBALL> tag to refer specifically to the text in the paragraph in your document. 21. This way, when your XML browser examines the document, the document knows what data it contains, and that makes the content more intelligent. 22. Search engines that make use of XML so data can do a better job of finding the pages you are looking for because of the intelligent nature of XML content.

23. XML, by design, does not deal with how the data are displayed to the end user. 24. Because HTML is a presentation language, XML documents use HTML tags to help handle the visual formatting of the document. 25. Also, you can use XML in your HTML documents to provide metadata, which is data about data in the document.

26. XML will do to the Web and e-commerce what HTML originally did to the Internet. 27. XML and its associated applications have the potential to blow the roofoff the Internet and how we do business.

Notes

¹Spawn /spƆ:n/ v – породжувати, викликати

²XML = extensible markup language /iksˈtensibl ˈma:rk٨p ˈlæŋgwidʒ/ adj – роз­ширювана мова розмітки [гіпертексту], мова XML

³Customised /ˈk٨stǝmaiz/ v – звичний

⁴explicitly /ǝksˈplisitli/ adv – точно

Answer the questions.

1. What languages were derived from SGML? 2. What type of language is used to structure and format elements of a document? 3. Name two metalanguages. 4. What elements of data is XML (but not HTML) concerned with? 5. What is meant by the term 'extensible'? 6. What makes XML a more intelligent language than HTML? 7. What does the HTML markup tag <p> indicate? 8. Why are search engines able to do a better job with XML documents? 9. What type of website is particularly likely to benefit from XML?

13. Mark the following statements as True or False:

1. HTML is no longer useful for creating webpages. 2. SGML is more complex than XML.

3. XML files can only be used on Unix systems. 4. XML files can only be read by browser programs.

5. HTML is a markup language. 6. Internet searches will be better with XML files.