Guenter Hilmer - Phd Thesis - Glamorgan Dspace - University of ...

2.12 Technology 2 LITERATURE REVIEW
important conclusion is that the major factor affecting student perception of the
value of their laptops to their academic success is their perception of the quality
of faculty utilisation of the laptops for teaching. This is consistent with findings
at other campuses [157].
2.12.2 XML
The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is defined as follows:
“The extensible Markup Language (XML) is the universal format
for structured documents and data on the Web” [93]
It is a new accepted standard which allows the definition of markup languages in a
structured form. Several books have already been written about it [158][159][160]
[161] and it is used in educational projects on the WWW (cf. section 2.7). How-
ever, XML focuses on the meta-information about specific information and not on
its presentation to the user. This task is done by the Extensible Stylesheet Lan-
guage (XSL). XML will be used in this PhD project to create a special teaching
and learning strategies oriented markup language. Educational data will then be
marked up with meta-information within this language.
2.12.3 XSL
Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is a language for expressing stylesheets. It
consists of two parts:
• A language for the transformation of XML documents
• An XML vocabulary that specifies formating semantics
An XSL stylesheet specifies the presentation of a class of XML documents by
describing how an instance of the class is transformed into an XML document
that uses the formating vocabulary [162]. Boumphrey claims that the usage of
stylesheets in a WWW-context is also accepted and used in the field [163]. Spe-
cially defined XSL stylesheets will be used to display the educational data to the
student.
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