Let me sketch out some thoughts which I hope to elaborate as I go today.

I'm in a programmer's zone right now -- which is both good and hard to navigate.  Yesterday, I spent the day grokking the MOA2 standard while learning the XML Spy IDE.  I was on a roll most of the day.  I quite enjoy XML Spy (though I wonder whether there are cheaper yet equally powerful XML editing environments) -- this GUI has given me quite a new understanding of XML schemas and XML itself.  Such environments make it so much easier to work with XML.

I hit a roadblock near the end of the afternoon with writing an XSLT file to do what I want.  That's what I want to get back to today.  One goal is to transform one of the MOA2 sample objects in a very simple HTML page.  Another is to try out XSL-FO to see whether I can get a PDF file out of the MOA2 XML.  As I mentioned previously, we're very interested in interoperability among libraries, museums, and learning management systems.  A proof-of-concept I want to develop is to interconvert MOA2, EAD, IMS XML formats.  Surely, someone must have done these interop experiments....but I haven't found any mention of such work in my cursory web search.

I also spent some time studying the METS standard (which builds on MOA2).  I didn't have a clear understanding of the relationship between the two.  From what I understand, METS is a generalization and an updating of MOA2.  Consequently METS is expressed in terms of an XML schema rather than the DTD of MOA2.   However, it would be nice to see some HTML interface to a METS object -- are they out there? 

I'm deeply gratified that David Carter-Todd mentioned my activities in his blog yesterday.  I've been an avid reader of Serious Instructional Technology for a year now (or so) -- and David is quite knowledgeable about the tech side of things (among others). 

I'm off to campus to pick up a copy of XML in a Nutshell (I'm looking for a good XML reference -- and the book is not on safari.oreilly.com yet.  BTW, I'm a happy subscriber to the service; it helps me a lot not to have to lug too many books between my office and my house.  Safari works well for reference books and (not surprisingly) not so well (for me anyhow) with books that I want to sit back with and think through carefully.  That's how O'Reilly will continue to see books in addition to electronic books for some time to come.

(Part of this programming obession is that it makes it difficult for me to write that much.  Chris reminded me yesterday on his blog about our plans to co-write Part III of a series of articles on weblogging that Chris has been writing.  I suggested his posting some questions and my responding to them as a way to kick off the writing....He's done his part.  Now it's my turn.)

It's interesting to me how much freeer and fluid I feel in my writing right now as I type away in the WYSIWG window of IE -- rather than doing my customary blogging through Radio.  Sad to say, Radio is far from my prefered writing environment.  I'd much rather write in a WYSIWG window -- or Word or Ecco or a good HTML editor (like Dreamweaver) than Radio.  Radio is still kinda klunky.  I'm glad that Userland is at the forefront of using web services, however, to allow multiple interfaces to be put into place.