XML/XSL

This section contains links to XML versions of papers I wrote while earning a B.S. in Technical Communication at New Mexico Tech.

The links below serve XML documents that are formatted as HTML "on the fly." Your browser validates the XML against the XML document's included DTD. Then, your browser applies HTML formatting instructions that it automatically downloads from an XSL file referenced by the XML document. No CSS formatting is used.

View the DTD code: Essay.dtd View the XSLT code: Essay.xsl

I wrote the DTD and the XSL from scratch as an exercise to teach myself the fundamentals of XML and XSL. This DTD-XSL combination seems versatile enough to accommodate most humanities styles, as long as HTML output is acceptable. It supports automatic numbering of footnotes, the XLink namespace, bibliographies, tables, figures, automatic caption numbering, etc.

Some documents in this section use Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). FireFox 2/3 includes built-in support for SVG. If you are using Internet Explorer, you may want to install SVG support with the Adobe SVG plugin. The SVG plugin for Internet Explorer works well. Support for SVG in FireFox is still buggy.

If you are using FireFox on Linux, you may not see some special characters, such as special math characters. The Mozilla programming team discusses Mozilla's XML support at the Mozilla web site. If your browser is old, it may not provide XML-to-HTML rendering at all. Internet Explorere 6/7/8 and FireFox 2/3 work. If you must use an old version of Internet Explorer and have not yet installed MSXML, you might want to search the Microsoft Developer Network for instructions on installing XML capabilities in Internet Explorer.

Report: description and analysis of the design of a small alcohol-burning lamp. (uses SVG)
Report: short, simple report on the three methods of transferring heat. (uses SVG)
Book Review : William K.Horton's Designing and Writing Online Documentation: Help Files to Hypertext.
Review of Two Essays: Scott Hubbard's "Process Implementation—The Key to Quality Documentation" and Roger A. Grice and Lenore S. Ridgway's "Information Product Testing: An Integral Part of Information Development"
Review of an Article : very short review of an article on using special characters in documents that contain mathematics.
Persuasive Piece: proposal for a history of math course, very persuasive.
Report : the technical communication internship I did at the New Mexico Petroleum Recovery Research Center. This is a lengthy report even without the appendices, which I do not include. (uses SVG)
Book Review : Kenneth Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives. Burke is considered to be America's foremost rhetorician of the twentieth century.
Report: research into the origins of our writing system. This may be too dry for those who don't have a taste for this sort of thing. But, it does contain some interesting ideas of my own.
Article: the Petroleum Technology Transfer Council. I wrote it during my internship at the New Mexico Petroleum Recovery Research Center .
Essay: my high school summer job as a garbageman. If you are looking for entertainment, this is as close as I get.
Essay: how I wrote the garbageman essay. Looking back, I doubt that I accurately described the process. I think I invented most of this.
Essay: Edgar Allan Poe. I like this one, and it seems to have made its way into several cheat-sheet repositories available to students who choose not to write their own American Literature essays. I'm flattered. If you're familiar with Poe and his place in American literature, read this one.
Editorial: criticism of prescriptivist grammarians. I wrote it for TECHnikos, New Mexico Tech's now-defunct (?) STC student chapter newsletter.
Essay: twentieth-century American literature, focusing on one short story from each of Katherine Ann Porter, Alice Walker, and Ernest Hemingway. You'll probably need to be familiar with these authors to understand this essay.
Essay: Renaissance rhetoric. If you are a Renaissance scholar, this is for you; otherwise, skip it.
Essay: my experience of researching Renaissance rhetoric. It leads up to how I came to forgive the Renaissance rhetoricians.
Thesis (not coming soon) . . . an evolved version of the project I did at New Mexico Tech for Technical Communication 422, Senior Thesis. Most of the research I need to extend the project is not yet published. My thesis is about mathematics, evolution, communication, and survival. I keep it listed here to remind myself that I really do want to complete this paper. Some researchers whose work I'm monitoring can be found on the Internet. If you're interested, start with William H. Calvin's home page and the web site for Stephen Wolfram's New Kind of Science .