Sine qua non

On technologies dependence


http://www.woolfsonandtay.com/1/post/2011/07/inconsolable-bookseller.html

Sine qua non

On organizing information

Dita Lab Session 01

In this first session of DITA Lab I followed the tasks assigned to us. Initially they seemed to me quite basic but after revising them I realized some things I have missed...

Autumn leaf that depicted my weather report

I got a general picture of how information is "processed" in a computer, from the smallest unit to a document, how it is translated into files and accessed through certain software programs as you can see in this humble graphic of mine:

I also reflected on the importance of a file extension and how this can help the computer map the file with the appropriate program; how Notepad and Wordpad allows us to view/store files using ASCII but not metadata. For this last purpose there are more complex formats like Word or HTML that can gives us information about layout, style, font and others by using tags. Not only have we the ASCII text but also a series of meta information like this:

mso-font-signature:-520081665 -1073717157 41 0 66047 0;}

@font-face

{font-family:Consolas;

panose-1:2 11 6 9 2 2 4 3 2 4;

mso-font-charset:0;

mso-generic-font-family:modern;

mso-font-pitch:fixed;

mso-font-signature:-520092929 1073806591 9 0 415 0;}

/* Style Definitions */

p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal

{mso-style-unhide:no;

mso-style-qformat:yes;

mso-style-parent:"";

margin-top:0in;

margin-right:0in;

margin-bottom:10.0pt;

margin-left:0in;

line-height:115%;

Documents in HTML format can store several files if they contain images, formatted text, sound files and beyond.

Starting from a file-centred view we progressed towards a document-centred view.

Interesting task was the one where we inserted an image in the file we were working but to make it work as a link, so the image data does no longer need to be in the document, just a reference link to it. (In case the image is deleted from the computer the document won't be able to show it.) It's a useful tip in terms of computer storage.

Did some experimenting and was able to find among other things the "mentioning of an image" in an HTML document viewed in Notepad by using the Find key and typing /jpg./, easy and fast!