Mariage

I made some decisions about the bibliography system for articles, and implemented them:

• Explicitly-included items in biblio lists at the end of the document are pulled in from the central biblio by the XQuery, and rendered in place by the XSLT. This means they can be customized (sorted into multiple lists with different headings, for instance), but they're still drawn from a single central source.
• Where <ref> tags point at biblio items which are not explicitly referred to in the article biblio, their items are pulled in by the XQuery and stored in a different list, which is not rendered visibly in the page. This means they don't appear in the explicit lists, but clicking on their links in the document itself will pop up their data.

I also fixed a couple of other things -- for instance, French quotation marks are usually set off from the quoted text by spaces, but these spaces (which were u+0020) were allowing wrapping, causing quote marks orphaned on lines. I've now used non-breaking spaces in both the XSLT and the CSS -- after learning how to do Unicode characters by codepoint in the CSS: :lang(fr){ quotes: "«\00a0" "\00a0»" "‹\00a0" "\00a0›" "‘" "’" }.

Began work on the task of centralizing all the bibliography items.

In the existing marked-up article, there was a combination of some local items, listed at the end, and some "centralized" items, in the main site biblio. First, I copied all the items from the article into their appropriate locations in the main biblio; then I changed the references pointing to them so that they point to the remote file. Tested this, and those links in the text are still working.

Next, I commented out the complete <bibl> items in the article file, and replaced them with items that look like this:

<bibl corresp="../../back_matter/biblio/biblio.xml#dejean_2003"></bibl>

My basic plan is to have the full text of these items retrieved by the XQuery, so that they're complete again. However, this is slightly paradoxical, since it means that there are references in the main text which point at the remote bibliography, and retrieve their data by AJAX, while the actual biblio entries will be sitting in the document itself by the time the XQuery has run and retrieved them. I need to think about this again, I think. The main difficulty is the requirement to list some items at the end of the article, while others actually referred to in the text are not listed for some reason. Also, I can't simply retrieve all the referenced items and list them in a sorted list at the end, because CC likes to divide them into groups ("Sources" and "Études citées"). I may need to accept a degree of redundancy in the interest of allowing maximum flexibility for article authors. Still thinking...

I've started work on a new stylesheet provisionally titled "Laon", which is fundamentally black text on a white background. At the moment, that's just too stark, but I'm going to keep hacking away at it for the next few weeks. One problem is that the shield image is white on transparent, and doesn't show up on a white background; it's not inserted through CSS, so it can't easily be changed, although I could trap the $pageStyle value in site_menu.xsl to insert a different image. I'll need to get the original SVG from Greg to make a new one, though, because the white one is anti-aliased.

Fixed the "enormous title bug" (on TOC pages, the HTML title that shows up in the browser caption bar was the concatenation of all the titles of all the documents), the bug which inserted duplicate hidden text blocks into TOCs, and a bug which prevented bibliographical references in TOC introductions from turning into working popups.

After discussion with CC, we've decided to move to one centralized bibliography, containing all items. Articles etc. will link to items in that bibliography, and any items referenced in an article will be retrieved with the article and listed at the bottom. This makes for more consistency.

Checked the whole site for broken links, using the W3C link checker, and fixed a bunch of expired or obsolete links, mostly caused by changes to site structure.

This has actually come out a bit better than I expected, because I've added a couple of features at the last minute. You can now retrieve a list of all links to a particular reference from two locations, the main "Allusions-notes" page, and the popup you see when you click on a reference link in a document. In each case, at the bottom of the reference explanation itself, you see the link "Liens à cette référence dans les documents". When you click on this link, the browser retrieves a list of links in the background and adds them into the page below the link. The links are sorted by document (so if there are two documents, there are two lists of links). When you click on an actual link, you will be taken to the location in the document where that link occurs; and the link itself will flash yellow a few times, so you can see it easily. Even if you're moving to a new page, the same reference item should open up on the page you're navigating to, so it should appear as though the reference popup stays open.

In the process, I've also done some more revisions to the layout and style, making the text a bit bigger in the popup, and moving it a little to the right; I've fixed some colour issues in the alternate stylesheets, and refactored some JavaScript code.

The link which retrieves references has been added, with a call to a JS function not yet implemented, along with a container for receiving the results from the AJAX call.

To do our planned round-trip reference linking, we need to be able to jump to a specific instance of a reference link in a document. This means that all links need to have unique ids, which is achieved by using their key, supplemented by a counter which makes them unique, counting 1-based from the beginning of the document. This has now been achieved, so you can navigate to a unique instance of a reference link in a document.

In the process, I found some bugs caused by the fact that the main reference file structure was severely broken; failure to close div elements had led to many references being nested several levels deep inside preceding ones. This is now fixed. We have to watch for this!

Integrated the article display into the site based on instructions from CC, and also made an adjustment to the left position of the main content div (div#content), changing it from 18em to 26em. This makes for more blank space on the page, which makes reading easier. This is the first of several layout adjustments that I think we need to make, to make the site more elegant, and I'd also like to create a better default stylesheet (with black text on a light background).