XML: Tedious or Easily Organized Data

With my experience with using TEI-XML, I found that it was quite a bit confusing at first, but after a while of seeing the example, I was able to understand the organization of tags. The whole goal of the assignment was take in letters and sort the information in XML. After a couple hours of reading the instructions I noticed the trends of starting a tag while also closing the tag on the same line when I was done. I really didn’t find the process fulfilling or compelling because as it felt very tedious inputting the same information and creating new tags or categories. I personally found it quite interesting and an experience that I find wasn’t wasted because it taught me another coding language that could be useful. I didn’t find the concept of utilizing XML for the letters all too enjoyable, but I appreciate getting the knowledge on how it works. The more I worked with XML, I felt like the language was restricted because of how organized it was and I probably would not see me using this in the future or on my own time. Most of the challenge that I found was understanding where to place and piece together the information without looking at the other template. This also reminded me of the articles I had read for class, specifically about looking out for errors. I find it that the more and expansive the file is, it is more likely that you could indeed come up with an error just because you didn’t see or missed a tag.

In this image of my work, it shows the levels of organization XML has to offer in terms of each line telling you what information is going to be inside the tags. It also shows how the tags work by the alignment of opening and closing tags.