Mariage

Met with Claire, France and Helena to arrange time on computers, plans for the work, etc. I have one task out of this: I need to write a simple description of the wildcard functionality in the search, for translation into French and inclusion on the Recherche page.

We now have three distinct styles for the site, and we need a way to switch between them, and store the user's preference. After a bit of reading around, I think this is the best approach:

• Implement a style page which allows the user to preview the styles and choose one.
• Choosing a style sets a cookie in the user's browser.
• Sitemap pipelines for rendering pages follow this example to branch based on the value of the cookie.
• Instead of branching to different stylesheets, the XSLT stylesheet is the same in each branch, but different parameters are passed to it, as in the second example snippet on this page.
• The XSLT stylesheet inserts different CSS in the output (one file in the case of regular pages, and two files in the case of the imgae markup pages) depending on the value of the parameter passed to it.

This would be a good approach to building the functionality:

1. Tweak the XSLT code to use a parameter to determine the CSS to use, and give it a default value (the current preferred style).
2. Create test pipelines using slightly different URLs which pass other parameters in, and make sure that the stylesheets do switch appropriately.
3. Make the real pipelines branch based on the cookie value. At this point, the cookie doesn't exist, so we should always see the default style.
4. Hack the cookies in your browser to add appropriate values, and check whether the style is switched appropriately. Try this in various browsers.
5. Write the stylesheet switching page, and test it thoroughly.
6. Add the stylesheet switching page to the site menu.

Adding this as a task.

IE7 screws up the display of the site title (it's cut in half, and the decorative border below it is gone). Can't figure it out yet, but it must be fixed before the Nebraska presentation.

Added notBefore and notAfter attributes to the dates of three text documents and uploaded them to the database, as well as copying them to the server archive where Claire and France work.

I'm adding this as a task because the search page needs to be updated somehow so it can display these imprecise dates. This is a bit complicated, and will need some thought, but we do need to be able to allow people to specify a date range anyway.

This task postponed into the fall because of updates to TEI -- may be best to wait for the next version of P5, which will change the handling of @facs and necessitate an update to the Image Markup Tool, and in the meantime, work on these guidelines while refining the schema and training the next encoder/assistant.

Create a set of instructions for the markup of images (including the categories and teiHeader), and of other types of document, giving full details of how to create linking notes, handle page breaks, line-groups and lines, and all other textual features encountered so far.

Get the changed files from Claire and France's directory on the server, validate them, and push them into the db.

Two components to this task:

• For content owned by us (markup, editorial content, code etc.): use the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada licence.
• For the images, clarify that we are using them under licence (a copy will be posted when it is received), and anyone wishing to use or reproduce them will have to contact the BN.

In the process of fixing biblio information in some of the documents, I ran up against a couple of questions:

1. Two of the documents, Reconfort des Femmes and Purgatoire, are sourced from the same 19th-century collection. The first included the info that it was from "Tome IV", but there's no volume number in the data for the other one. Is Purgatoire also from Tome IV?
2. Purgatoire also lacks an author tag. Is it "anon."?

Using the one file I've already fixed, a_une_femme_mariee.xml, fix the remaining files which use the XInclude feature to include source description metadata (see this post). Make sure each has an appropriate <analytic> tag.

As part of the move to the new design, we should refactor a lot of the original site code. Here are things we should do:

1. The index XML generated through index.xq is not TEI XML; it's a temporary format just used for rendering. Now that we have explicit biblStruct elements for each document, we should actually construct a proper TEI document containing a <listBibl> element which simply lists the <biblStructs>. The only question is, when there is more than one, do we include both? We could include both using the corresp attribute to link them both to the same document id, and then process only the first.
2. This is an appropriate document format:

   <TEI xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0">
       <teiHeader>
           <fileDesc>
               <titleStmt><title>test</title>
               </titleStmt>
               <publicationStmt><p></p></publicationStmt>
               <sourceDesc>
                   <listBibl>
                       <bibl></bibl>
                   </listBibl>
               </sourceDesc>
           </fileDesc>
           
       </teiHeader>
       <text><body><div></div></body></text>
       </TEI>
   

3. There is also the problem of the classCode element, which is not in the <biblStruct>. We need to find a way to get that information into the <biblStruct> (where it should presumably be encoded anyway).
4. Having updated index.xq, we'll then need to update index.xsl to process the results.
5. The XML will then serve as a useful bibliographical reference for the whole collection, and can be made available directly.
6. The JavaScript inserted by the index.xsl file should be abstracted into a separate file (if it's actually needed -- it's to do with the menu display, which is changing anyway).

This is urgent -- we need the design working next week before the showcase.