Over the course of completing the first project, there were a few things that I noticed using XML to write a paper (which I had not done before). First, I was not used to writing XML with such strict standards. Through the course of the co-op that I just finished, I wrote and read a fairly decent amount of XML, as we used it for configuration files. XML of this ilk is not particularly rigid, especially as it was only used, to a degree, internally. In that setting we could pretty much add or subtract any elements we wanted without noticeable repercussions. So getting used to writing within the bounds of a specific schema was rather interesting. Not to say interesting, i.e., bad, quite the opposite in fact; the ability to know, essentially, exactly what was going to be within each element was quite pleasant.
Using XML to create my annotated bibliography was novel and rather refreshing. I would say that the key enjoyable element was how explicit the structures were. Normally when one is reading, the various structures (the citation, the elements of the citation, the elements of the annotation, etc.) are implicit, our minds just understand them. In this format, one has to think very precisely about what to write. Having this relatively rigid structure helps to organize thoughts which makes for a more efficient, and often times more satisfying writing experience.
As we move on to projects 2 and 3, I don’t really think that the schema needs a lot of revisions. For my purposes, as simple as they may have been (I’ve no idea what anyone else did), the schema worked just fine, although I wasn’t really able to find a real, solid use for the value statement attribute of the relevance tag. As far as composition goes, I really only used Oxygen to look up attributes for tags and to validate my XML files. For the actual writing of the bibliography, I used vim (more specifically neovim), but I realize my choice of composer is rather unusual.
Overall, I would describe my experience with project 1 to be quite enjoyable. To me, the concept of making generally implicit (except in maybe some post-modern books) genre structures explicit is borderline revelatory.
