HCMC Blogs

A bit more thought suggests that the underlines for signature etc. referred to in the preceding post should be encoded as a string of non-breaking spaces inside a <hi rend="underline"> tag.

Spent most of the day working on the second article, which raises all sorts of interesting issues. Among them are these:

• The article has one place where there are two tables, each with their own captions, and an overall caption for the pair of tables. The only way I can think of to capture this is to have the tables as components of a <figure> element. This has the added bonus that it reduces the number of block elements that appear in a paragraph, and enables us to say that all breakout/embedded components (images, graphics, tables etc.) are (from a markup point of view) figures, and appear in a <figure> tag.
• Another such element in the document consists only of text, being a representation of a form filled out by students. This, IMHO, ought actually to be a scan of the original document, but there are situations in which I can imagine text being used in this way. There is a <floatingText> element in TEI, but this is not really floating text; instead, I'm marking it up in an <ab> tag, which is itself inside a <figure> tag.
• All this has brought to light also the issue of caption placement (it should be above tables and below figures in APA), and also numbering (which, the APA suggests, should be distinct for tables and figures, with Figure 1, Figure 2 etc. alongside Table 1, Table 2). Our markup needs to be flexible enough to accommodate not only this but other systems prescribed by other styles.
• The "form" illustration mentioned above contains some horizontal lines (for signing and dating). I'm not sure how I'm supposed to do those in TEI; that'll need some research. I've looked around a bit, but I can't find anything so far.
• I had to add the tagdocs module to the schema to get the <code> tag, but I stripped out most of its components, and took the opportunity to strip out some stuff from elsewhere at the same time, so the resulting schema came in a bit smaller. That's not a bad approach -- every time you add or change something, take a look through one or two of the modules you already have and see if there's anything you feel you can dump.
• Had to add <hi rend="compLabel"> to handle the captions of buttons, menus etc. in computer GUIs. There might be more of this kind of thing.
• Lots of back-and-forth on the TEI list about my suggestion to allow <ref> as a child of <biblStruct>, so we can include the URIs of electronic references.
• Also lots of discussion over whether lists can/should appear as siblings of paragraphs, or whether they might as well be deemed to be inside paragraphs (perhaps as the only constituent). My feeling is that my schema would be much simpler if everything like that had to be a child of <p>.

Linked the faculty page to Dr. Amaral's personal page, and tweaked a bit (some horizontal lines were missing).

As requested by the History Department I was able to add code to the Agenda web application that suppresses the second semester of a year long course, if the course information for that semester is the same as the first semester.

The history department requested that this functionality also be included with the time table display in order to shrink the report. However; after doing some research into what changes would be required I feel that this would be an enormous task to take on in such a short period of time (seeing that the way that the offering lists are printed is very different from the way the time table information is displayed so I can not just copy over the code.

Yesterday, after my meeting with the French Department, I was able to implement the professor specific course offering list (both on the viewing page and the report page). And I was also able to add a copy button, requested by the History Department, which allows the user to copy sequence one, in year terms, to sequence two automatically.

Although I took a two-hour lunch today, a prof from Hispanital arrived late in the day, and we ended up in discussions till 6 pm, so I logged another hour of G&T.

Dr. Amaral from Hispanital dropped by late in the day to ask about how to use his personal Web space, and we got talking about his PhD project, from which he'd like to move some code over to one of our servers. It's mainly Python and AJAX, with a database backend (but we don't know what the database engine is). It's currently at OSU, but he'd like to move it over here to begin rewriting it. It's an NLP/ICALL system which already has records of 3,000 interactions from learners of Portuguese.

I'll set up a meeting for the week after next with Greg, once he's back.

More info added to the Faculty page, and some minor reformatting.

Created files for all the graphics in the 2nd article. The simplest way to do this is to select and copy them in OpenOffice, then do Acquire/From Clipboard in the GIMP. Saved them as JPEG at full quality.

The appendix issue is clear from the guidelines; each appendix should be a <div type="appendix"> inside the <back> element.

Got the metadata from the editors and created the header for the article, then started doing the markup. This article has two items we haven't yet dealt with, tables and images, as well as a number of inline features which raised questions that I referred back to the editors. The tables are straightforward grid tables, so they're easy, but the images are fairly low-res (inline in the wp document), so I asked for originals, and began the discussion of acceptable and desired formats. There are also issues relating to URIs mentioned in the text (should ref URIs be in footnotes?), and there are appendices at the end; I need to do more reading in the Guidelines about appendices to find out whether they go in the <back> element or not, and what they should actually be (<div>s, presumably, but it's not clear yet).