Trying to keep the regular projects moving forward while also making progress with QT...
January 11, 2010
Made some progress today, getting the XML declaration highlighted, and also simple XML tags. For XML tags, the simplest approach seems to be to treat the tag start (< + optional slash + tag name) as one match, and the tag closer (optional slash + >) as another; this allows for highlighting of the tag contents separately, and also handles the problem of multi-line opening tags (pattern matching in the syntax highlighter component is through QRegExp, which seems to work line by line).
I still haven't figured out how to get the DTD declaration to highlight (it's on two lines); it looks as though I might have to take the same approach as with comments, and I'll need to figure out how to handle two different highlighting requirements using that approach. Handling attributes and their values is going to be a bit more complicated, because I'm not sure that I can definitively say whether an att+value combination is inside a tag or not; QRegExp supports lookaheads (but not lookbehinds). Finally, one remaining problem is specifying with accuracy the XmlName pattern for tags, which I haven't bothered to do yet (I'm just using an ascii model for the moment).
Recently we added data from 1222 through 1926 to the database of newspaper summaries. The dropdowns in the GUI for selecting the year had to be updated to allow for those additional years - changed parameters in php call that generates those dropdowns. The banner image also had to be updated. Did that - couldn't find the font previously used in the banner, so used Bernard MT Condensed in Inkscape, which looks much less Gothic.
MH presented to the History department on his research into early modern medical history, including work with the database. Contributed a couple of comments on how the technology can make data and research available to communities that original research might not have considered or worried much about (medical historians vs language historians vs social historians vs students in various fields vs genealogists)
Got final program on DBs for Historians seesion on Jan 18 from MH. Discussed presentation with Martin. Decided to go start from familiar and go to less familiar (spread sheet, simple table, relational table, hierarchical, data mining) with example from their department at each step. Got out template and started populating it with data from notes taken by Martin and me.
Added details for 2010 and 2009 workshop presenters and title. Added description and application form for 2010 workshop.
As Judy is off work this week, I updated the courses offered page on the Religious Studies site. Took the opportunity to slightly modify the structure of each course entry by separating the administrative details (section number, CRN number) and the time and room details.
Had a couple of conversations with Greg, and meeting with RS. The home1t file-system is reaching its capacity of 4 TB (can only be expanded by outlay of $6000 to $8000 for more drives). To facilitate maintenance and ease of recovery, we want to get that down to less than 2 TB.
ETCL occupies about 3/4 of that and grows faster than all other projects combined. So we plan to move the ETCL tree to its own filesystem. We've recently been working to create a 4 TB filesystem for INKE. That project has little data now but will have more coming. Considered putting ETCL and INKE into one filesystem, which could be expanded later fairly painlessly (sys-admins approving). RS prefers to have two separate filesystems, and not have to worry about expanding either for a long time. Getting an addition filesystem will require the RS request it. I sent an email summarizing situation which RS may wish to use in support of any such request.
After couple of discussions with Greg, we've decided to buy an Acer R3610 for just under $500 and try it out in B045. If it works, we'll buy a couple more before end of March. If not, then we'll probably have to buy a couple of cheap conventional PCs. Greg put together the web requisition and I approved it.
Worked most of the day on the rendering of editorial articles (modern content). The tricky part has been figuring out how best to re-use a lot of the rendering functionality we already have (such as reference and footnote popups) while still separating out the article rendering so that it can be differentiated where necessary from the anthology content, without duplicating code. I have a new XSLT file called article_p5_to_xhtml.xsl, which is not long, but takes control of the processing at a crucial point, and a new rendering @mode attribute in the XSLT which can be used to fork the processing at various points. All documents still commence their processing with index.xsl, though, and inherit all the main site components at that point.
The basics:
- Articles are retrieved from the URL
/article.htm?id=whatever. - Bibliography items and lists which are fully defined in the original document are rendered visibly in the output, before the footnotes; they're also available as popups from links in the main body.
- Bibliography items which are referred to, but which reside in the main collection bibliography, are retrieved into the document but hidden; they are shown when the reference link is clicked on.
- Footnotes are rendered at the bottom of the document, but also shown as popups from buttons in the text.
- References should work like main-collection biblio items, although there are none in this article anyway.
- Links to anthology documents can go to the document, or to a page in the document (if there are pages with numbers captured by the appropriate tags), or to annotations in image markup documents.