Contact Us on 0800 123 4567 or info@example.com

Mariage

le mariage sous l'ancien régime

Category: "Activity log"

February 13, 2008

Image rendering virtually finished

Posted by on 13 Feb 2008 in Activity log

Worked all day on the image rendering, and some other aspects of the site:

  • All IMT-related JS and XSLT code is converted to camelBack.
  • A variety of JS bugs relating to positioning of the annotation menu and popups, and drag-dropping them, have been fixed.
  • Image preloading has been added for the main images, so that display of popup full-size views may be a little quicker.
  • All colour information has been lifted out of the imt stylesheet and moved to grey.css.
  • Font sizing throughout the site has been rationalized, based on a 62.5% font setting on the <body>, with all other sizing in ems or percents. Removal of lots of spurious font size settings has got rid of over-large headings etc.
  • Two small CSS files have been completely removed from the set, one having been deleted completely as unnecessary, the other having its small set of rules added into mariage_typeset_layout.css.
  • A system for resizing the image display on the fly has been added. This seems to be working pretty well. At sizes at or below 800 width, it uses the smaller 800px version of the image; at any larger sizes it uses the full-scale image.
  • Image resize/reload also remembers and restores the annotation you were looking at when you resized.
  • Search results rendering has been updated to point correctly to camelBacked id attributes of annotation areas.
  • Some preliminary testing has been done on other browsers, with a few fixes added for some obvious IE problems.

Next stages:

  • Serious cross-platform cross-browser testing and tweaking.
  • Conversion of grey.css code to complete the other alternative stylesheets.

Then we'll be ready to run...

February 12, 2008

Got the image markup half-working

Posted by on 12 Feb 2008 in Activity log

Worked on the IMT interactive image output in XHTML, the last major portion of the site to be converted to the new system. First, I took the IMT's own web_view output code and started from that. The XSLT there expects to create a full page, whereas we're now rendering everything inside a framework created by index.xsl, so I had to abstract the IMT XSL into two named templates, one of which places CSS and JS in the header, the other doing the body content. That was straightforward.

Next was camelBacking all the actual code (XSLT, CSS and JS) to fit our new Mariage standards. That was tedious but not hard.

Finally, conversion involved making customizations to the XSLT to match what's needed on our site.

The result is something which looks monstrous at the moment (the CSS clashes with the core site CSS, and the font size problem is obvious), but it all works, and it shouldn't be too hard to massage it into something that looks good. I reckon about two to four hours should have it working. Then we'll have a fully-functional site using the grey.css file, and we can go on to look at the other optional stylesheets.

February 11, 2008

Image gallery working

Posted by on 11 Feb 2008 in Activity log

The image gallery is now working in the way planned and laid out by Greg. It pages the images in sets of 12. The only remaining issue is the positioning of the Next/Previous buttons (and perhaps their styling).

Next is the rendering of actual interactive image pages.

Changes uploaded to DB

Posted by on 11 Feb 2008 in Activity log

I've validated the changes to the two image files and two text files, and uploaded them into the database. Everything seems to be working OK, but please take a look to check, especially in the case of the text documents.

February 8, 2008

finished transcribing

Posted by on 08 Feb 2008 in Activity log
I've finished transcribing "Sermon des cocus" and "Advis donné aux hommes martrysez" unless problems appear when they are posted on the website, and I am ready for more documents to work on. As well, all the [sic]s in "Sermon des cocus" have been removed. Bon weekend!

More progress

Posted by on 08 Feb 2008 in Activity log

I've been working all day on rationalizing and cleaning out the code. I've converted everything to camelBack notation except for a few remaining JavaScript functions (I want to evaluate whether we need those at all, later). I've removed some old XSLT 1.0 utility templates which were easily replaced with custom functions or new XPath functions in XSLT 2.0. I've worked through all the distinct elements used in the text documents and added handlers for them; and I've fixed up the rendering of prose and verse documents so that everything basically seems to be working, including note display.

February 7, 2008

Making steady progress

Posted by on 07 Feb 2008 in Activity log

Basic text documents are now rendering readably, but there's still a lot to do on the text docs. I've managed to simplify and standardize the system by which site content written directly in XHTML is rendered (or, actually, copied to the output). It's now enclosed in a <div class="htmlContainer" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">, and this XSLT catches it and copies it to the output:

    <xsl:template match="xhtml:div[@class='htmlContainer']" mode="#all">
        <xsl:copy-of select="./*" />
    </xsl:template>

I've been struggling a bit with the CSS that came over from Greg's site design, because it depends on a root setting of font-size: 62.5% on the <body> element; I find myself having to override that all over the place, to get readable text, but I don't want to mess with it because the layout of the menu depends on it. We'll have to rationalize that at some point; we probably shouldn't be setting a base font size so low.

Rewriting XSLT from scratch for v3 of the site

Posted by on 07 Feb 2008 in Activity log

The XSLT for the last version of the site had grown slowly by accretion, and it was overly complicated; basic page setup was handled in three different places, depending on whether the document was an Image Markup doc, a text doc from the collection, or a site information page; and there was a lot of unnecessary code carried over from other projects.

Since we're now doing a redesign, this is an opportune time to rewrite all this code, so I've been making a start. The first thing to do is to centralize the code which handles the basic page layout (title, menu, any footer, etc.), and the head tag with all its CSS and JavaScript file links. I've centralized all of this in index.xsl, so all XHTML rendering now calls this file.

The main XSL file then imports six others, and lays out the page; then it branches based on the type of document that's being rendered, calling special functions that will handle a text (prose/verse) document, or an IMT document. I'm also making some use of the @mode attribute to provide different templates to handle the same TEI element depending on whether it's part of a site document, or a collection doc.

Uploaded new files, and fixed some errors

Posted by on 07 Feb 2008 in Activity log

Uploaded FL's changed files into the db after validating them. Then I went on to look at H's report of missing functionality in the text rendering of Sermon des Cocus. I added handling for CSS code in @rend attributes, and this worked fine for the text indents, but wasn't working for the text-align: center setting in headers. Going back to the markup, I found that H had used:

rend="text-align:centre;"

instead of:

rend="text-align:center;"

Much as I wish it were not so, US spelling is required in CSS property names and values. I've fixed the file in the db and in the editing folder on the server, and the titles are now appearing centred.

February 1, 2008

Finished new search system

Posted by on 01 Feb 2008 in Activity log

Finished updating the search system so that it handles the new file format, implements the new quick-search function directly from the site menu, and displays something readable (in the grey.css theme at least).

The idea of the new quick-search is that, in addition to having a link to "Recherche" on the menu, which takes you to the search page, there's also a little text box right on the menu. You can type into that text box and press return, and you'll be taken to the search page, then the page will use that text for a basic search operation immediately. It passes the search via the url string. This also enables bookmarking of simple searches, which might be handy. Because the main search uses AJAX, it's hard to bookmark a complex search.