Mariage

I've completed the following stuff on the new version of the site:

• Stylesheet switching from the menu. For this, I used my own code rather than Greg's, but I also managed to learn something new about the Cookie Selector in Cocoon which enabled me to streamline it considerably. I can now pass the value of a cookie directly into an XSLT transformation as a parameter, like this:

  <map:select type="cookie-selector">
    <map:parameter name="cookie-name" value="PageStyle"/>
    <map:when test="">
      <map:transform type="saxon" src="xsl/index2.xsl">
        <map:parameter name="PageStyle" value="grey" />
      </map:transform>
    </map:when>
    <map:otherwise>
      <map:transform type="saxon" src="xsl/index2.xsl">
        <map:parameter name="PageStyle" value="{request:cookieMap/PageStyle/value}" />
      </map:transform>
    </map:otherwise>
  </map:select> 
  

  This is well worth remembering. Previously I was doing a complicated when statement, because I didn't know how to use the cookieMap.
• Document listings filtered by type (prose, verse, engravings, or all). This is now achieved by passing a parameter into the XQuery in the URL. Eventually, the engravings link will go to a special page which uses the gallery layout, but for now it just works as a list like the other pages.
• Readable text everywhere. In some of the stylesheets, text was not readable against its background, for various reasons. This is now fixed.
• Teaser popup functionality and layout. This is all working, but the background image/colour (it's a combination of both) is not quite right yet, and also needs differentiating across the styles.
• Teaser links are buttons. Previously they were text links, but now we've made them into actual buttons, which makes them easier to lay out and style.
• Various fixes to code taken from Greg's site (such as removing href="#" attributes, which add an unnecessary hash to the page URL).

Next to be done, in order of ease and practicality:

1. Text document output
2. Search page
3. Menu-based search functionality
4. Gallery view of engravings
5. Actual image markup output (needs some careful rethinking, and has to be completely rewritten because we've abandoned SVG)

Managed to get the basic site pages ported over to Greg's design, with the accordion menu working. One limitation of the accordion menu emerged immediately: it always opens the first submenu, even if you've just landed on a page from the second one. I've had to write some JavaScript that decides which submenu to open by comparing the current path to a list of filenames from each submenu category. A bit hacky, but it works.

Next is integrating my original style-switching code (JS and Cocoon sitemap switching based on cookies) so that Greg's style submenu works.

We want to leave the existing Mariage site fully functional while we convert to the new site, so I've set up a temporary project site where we can work on integrating the new look.

It has, of course, no CSS. The XQuery and some of the XSLT has been converted so that most of the pages more or less work, with the exception of the actual document display. In the process of editing the XQuery I've been able to dispense with a lot of prefixes, now we no longer need to distinguish between SVG and TEI elements. It also strikes me that we should be able to dispense with the old <html_block> pseudo-tag I was using to insert verbatim blocks of XHTML code into documents; instead, we should perhaps use pure XHTML in the correct namespace, with a mechanism that looks like this:

<div class="blockContainer" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <p>A paragraph...</p>
  <img...></img>
</div>

with matchers that work like this:

<xsl:template match="xhtml:div[@class='blockContainer']">
  <xsl:copy-of select="*" />
</xsl:template>

I haven't tested this yet, but I'm sure it can be made to work OK, which should simplify things and remove the proprietary container tag I'm currently using.

Once that's done, and the core XSLT has been refined a bit, I need to make sure the search is working (its AJAX functionality will need checking). After that, we'll be ready to start integrating the new look CSS.

Since this project got started long before TEI P5 was finalized, it uses a slightly obsolete pre-release version of the standard. It also depends on the inclusion of SVG for image markup. It's now time to move forward to the current P5 standard, so I've begun building a system for doing that. The first stage is a new schema: for that, I've taken the imt_1_7 schema and renamed it to mariage.rng. Next, I've created two XSLT files, one taken from the IMT, and one custom-written, to convert the image markup files and the text markup files to standard P5. This is all now working, and I have a set of working files which we can use in building the next version of the site.

Meeting with the whole team. Got H started marking up a text document.

The new document, Sermon des Cocus, has an <epigraph>, containing a <cit> with <quote> and <bibl>, and also a <gloss>. We need to add handling for this to the XSLT code.

Also, there are now instances of <head>, <p> and <l> which have a rend attribute expressed in CSS:

  <p rend="text-indent: 3em;">...</p>
  <head rend="text-align: center;">...</head>

We need to detect the use of CSS in a rend tag, and transfer it to the output XHTML tag. So far only text-indent and text-align have been used.

I downloaded the latest changes made by France, and also fixed one little validation error (in bosse.xml, some <lg> tags appeared inside a <p> tag, so I removed the <p> tag).

Then I reuploaded all the image markup files into the XML database. A quick check of the site suggests that all is working OK.

Project meeting. Key issues for me:

• We can begin posting new images to the site in the new year.
• I have to upgrade the IMT as soon as possible to handle the new FACS components instead of SVG.
• Greg and I have to manage the transition to the new site format by creating a development site, separate from the main site.
• The new site should use the new file format, so I need a simple conversion that will move all the old files to the new format in one go, and then I can install a new IMT on the developer computers.
• We'll be making a start soon on some new texts, at least one of which will have up to five variants which need to be collated.

I'm hoping to get to work on the new IMT version next week.

The following files are now ready:

• homme_porte_femme.xml
• poule_qui_chante.xml
• remouleur.xml
• fardeau_des_peres.xml
• cocus_que_vostre_joie.xml

Helena started work on linking between elements of three images, arising out of our proposal. I found that we don't have good instructions for marking up the references between documents; there's some explanation on the Encodage page, but it's not good enough. I need to clarify it. Tested her work, and it's functioning OK (minus a couple of typos she'll fix next week).

Put the proposal in as text and PDF, after adding Claire's new stuff, fleshing out some of my references and tidying up some bits and pieces.