JT is teaching his OE course this semester, and looking at the now-ancient materials on the site, it was clear that some would need to be updated (there were instructions relating to Netscape, etc., and the HotPot exercises were built with version 4).

I focused only on the exercises, since everything else is relatively simple, and working. These are the steps I took:

• Updated the index files for each unit to XHTML using Tidy.
• Created some Transformer transformations (details below).
• Created Masher files, one for each unit.
• Identified HTML errors in the original data (old HTML 4 code).
• Ran Transformer sequences to fix the data in the HotPot data files.
• Built the units.
• Ran more Transformer conversions to change the temporary index file pointers to the actual index.htm (can't have the Masher overwriting the original index files).

One exercise in unit 4 (1sing1.jcl) is problematic in that it has an 8859-1 thorn character in it; if this is run through Transformer at all, it gets borked, because Transformer can't tell that it's 8859-1, so it ends up assuming UTF-8. This file had to be handled manually. There is an annoying limitation in the Masher which means that you can't easily handle the index pages properly; either it overwrites the real one, or (if you change the output filename for the index page) it points all the Index buttons at the phony one it's creating. In future, if you need to go through a process like this again, a better option would be to rename the original index file temporarily, run the Masher stuff using index.htm, then delete the generated one and rename the original back to index.htm.