A few months ago I got an extra Westlake Training XML course manual from a co-worker and read through the beginning explaining what XML is and what makes a document well-formed and valid. I also read a lot of material on W3Schools, Wikipedia, and other sources. A few weeks after acquiring the manual I called up Westlake and got the new location of the course files to do the exercises, but then got sidetracked.
Finally last week I saw an announcement on the DC Web Women mailing list about a super-discounted 2-hour XML workshop being offered to members by Westlake. For $20 I found out I already knew a lot (the first 90 minutes were spent by the instructor basically demonstrating ways in which documents can be well-formed and valid or invalid), but I also got a chance to see some integrated examples of XML with XSLT and JavaScript and ask some questions. Now I feel pretty confident that I can write my own XSL and integrate XML data into HTML pages.
My new project idea is to build a web app for studying Japanese in the form of flashcards and flashcard quizzes. That way I can learn XML, XSL, and JavaScript, and study Japanese during free time at work and become super awesome fluent super fast. Yay!
