HCMC Blogs

PREPARED FRENCH SHIPMENT #2 (10 BOXES)
PREPARED HISPANICS SHIPMENT #1 (13 BOXES)

DETERMINED STATUS OF EXISTING HISPANIC MATERIALS IN ARCHIVE

UPDATED FRENCH AND HISPANIC DATA-BASES.

TOTAL ARCHIVE PROJECT BOXES PREPARED TODATE: 102

Worked on the problems in Opera and Safari with the search page. The problems are:

• Opera fails to import the retrieved responseXML from the AJAX request into the page. It performs the retrieval, but apparently can't handle the proper importNode code which I've been trying to use in order to get around innerHTML.
• Safari inserts the XML correctly into the document, but apparently considers it to be XML rather than XHTML, so although links appear, they are not clickable, and you can't get to any of the documents your search retrieved.
• Konqueror behaves like Opera (at least, the oldish version of Konqueror I have).

The only solution I could find to all cases was to sniff those browsers and cause them to set the BadBrowser variable; when this is set, the script reverts to using innerHTML to set the content of the results div using the XMLHttpRequest's responseText property, rather than using proper DOM methods with responseXML. What this means is that no browser except for Firefox currently works properly in this regard. Nevertheless, Safari is close, and WebKit doesn't show the problems we have with Safari, so it seems that in future Safari and Konqueror may be off the BadBrowser list.

Built an installer for IMT 1.5 and installed it on Endive and Chicory. Seems to work OK. I opened and re-saved all the old files using it, in order to get rid of the old appDesc blocks, and then re-edited them to change the schema filename to mariage.rng. In future, it shouldn't be necessary for any version of the IMT to mess with schema processing-instructions, so future upgrades should be less problematic.

Created an administrator role for each of two hums instances (one in lang02, one in hums), then created a published role for each of those. Created a "connection key" file for each of those four (file that launches the app, connects to the site, specifies what that user is allowed to to do, and asks for authentication).
Able to prevent user from creating new page or applying any kind of styling other than those elements and classes appearing in the dropdown list derived from the css file.
No improvement on the problems of not knowing what element the cursor is currently in and no way of modifying attributes that aren't visible (e.g. id's of instances or comments)

Since the IMT is being converted so that it uses a RelaxNG schema instead of an XSD schema, this project also needs to be converted. I took out all the XSD and XSI namespace and schema references, and also added the Oasis and oXygen processing-instruction links to a new mariage.rng schema.

Moved these changes, along with the new schema (which is a single standalone file, although large) back onto the project account. Validated all the files, fixing some errors in paris.xml (which had line elements in a paragraphs instead of in line-groups), with the exception of Sonnet de Courval. Uploaded all the files into the database.

Now, before any further work is done on the image markup files, I need to make sure there's a working installation of IMT 1.5 on the two work machines.

France has been translating the markup documentation, and I've now changed the menu item which points to it to show "Encodage", and replaced the English text of the page with her translation as far as she's got.

Using copy of hums site running in lang02 account (which contribute can successfully connect to - as opposed to copy of same files in hums site), tested to see how Contribute deals with css on standard xhtml elements and elements with classes.

In summary, it's going to be extremely difficult to use Contribute to maintain a site with typical css styling (e.g. the template files provided by web coordinator's office).
All the elements and classes appear in a drop-down list ready to apply, but there is no indication in the Contribute GUI of which elements and classes are applied to the current focus point. E.g. if the cursor is in an instance of an H2, the dropdown menu shows the current style as "bodytext", but if I choose H3, the tag is applied and the proper styling applied too. I see no way of having Contribute show me anything about the element with focus (let alone the tree for that element).

Checked the code generated by Contribute, and it is adding hard-coded style attributes into the xhtml which overwrite those in the style sheet for that element. E.g. the H3 tag in the css has margin settings, but the instance created by Contribute manually over-rides those with different margin settings. This happened even when I copied and pasted a selection. The duplicate had hard-coded style attributes not there in the original.

I could find no way of seeing html comments in Contribute, which means I cannot leave instructions as html comments, nor can I include templates as comments in the code. This compounds the problem noted above where copy and paste does not produce two identical instances of the object. I don't know if there's any way to edit e.g. the id attribute of an instance of an element in Contribute.

We're in a dilemma as to whether to server XHTML documents as application/xhtml+xml, which is correct, or text/html, which is wrong, but more widely supported. This morning I did some testing on various browsers to see what woks and what doesn't:

MIME type application/xhtml+xml

MIME type text/html

The results suggest that we really have no choice about using text/html, and even there, we have some problems with AJAX in Safari and Opera which need to be addressed.

Spent most of the day monkeying with a new style. It is by no means finished, but you can see it if you manually switch to the Alternate stylesheet.
Bugs(?):
* Opera is very sluggish with this stylesheet
* Firefox displays an odd white band across the top and bottom.

To do:
Fix bugs above
Get the generated code for the side panels adjusted to use my twiddled versions (vert_banner_5.png and vert_banner_6.png) or use all CSS for inserting and placing them.
Decide on menu placement.
Edit table styles
Do we want to twiddle the XHTML display for images? It currently does not include a link for alt.css - and there appear to be other (IMT generated) stylesheets associated with these images - check with Martin.