Re: teaching / learning axes

On Sun, May 29, 2011 10:33 pm, Philip Fearon wrote:
> Wouldn't a more interactive approach be to provide an online tool that
> lets you trace each step of any real XPath expression (by clicking on
> it), including axes and predicates, lighting up node 'hits' (against a
> selected source XML) on a tree view as you go? Or perhaps a more
> abstract view helps with the learning process.

My interactive approach when teaching XPath is firstly showing diagrams of
the axes for a simple document from the attendees' own field (or a more
generic one for an open class) then secondly giving attendees pieces of
paper identifying one of the nodes and asking them to sort themselves into
document order, identify their children and ancestors, etc.  People do
tend to get it quite well when they are the document.

Regards,


Tony Graham                                   tgraham@xxxxxxxxxx
Consultant                                 http://www.mentea.net
Mentea       13 Kelly's Bay Beach, Skerries, Co. Dublin, Ireland
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