We had our first lecture and practical session in Lab on DITA.
The practical session involved creating documents in different formats, seeing how these documents can be accessed through different applications; I saw some metadata in HTML format (used for web pages) which, personally to me, looks scary at the moment. Hopefully, it will make more sense in a few weeks time.
The first exercise consisted of creating a text document with Wordpad in ASCII format, which is the agreed encoding for alphanumerical characters. The ASCII encoding has some limitations as it is based on 7-string bytes, thus limiting it to 128 characters. It is also encodes only the US alphabet.
The first exercise consisted of creating a text document with Wordpad in ASCII format, which is the agreed encoding for alphanumerical characters. The ASCII encoding has some limitations as it is based on 7-string bytes, thus limiting it to 128 characters. It is also encodes only the US alphabet.
In the second task, after creating a document in Microsoft Word format, I tried to open it in Notepad. We got a window with lots of gibberish, reflecting how ASCII is trying to interpret the more complex encoding system of MSWord (there were some chunks of readable text though).
The third exercise consisted of creating an HTML document and inserting image in it. HTML is a language that uses alphanumerical characters and relies on ASCII and is used to mark the text up with some predetermined tags. When I viewed the HTM document in Notepad, it produced a page with lots of data, all of it readable, though not all yet interpretable and understandable. It is called metadata which stands for data about data.
Conclusion: I have learned some basic concepts of how the information is encoded, organised (file-centred or document-centred view) and interpreted by operating systems, as well as some connections between file formats. Even though, I use documents with different formats every day, I’ve never really thought of how they are created, deciphered and function.
