Mariage

EDIT by MDH 2011-12-22: I believe this task has been obviated by the proposed (and partially-implemented) change from using <argument> to using <label>. Setting this task to Completed.

Note to self: I thought I had made substantial amendments to the schema that would permit us to use <argument> inside e.g. <p>, because that's where our marginal arguments most often show up. However, in the Le Blanc text, that seems to be failing, so I need to revisit it. The text has been marked up in such a way that open ps and divs are being closed before and argument and opened again afterwards, and when I try to refactor appropriately, the code turns out not to be valid. Either the validation process is failing somehow, or the schema is not the most recent, or perhaps my modifications didn't go far enough.

I've spent quite a while this morning fixing page sizing and margin issues with the Le Blanc; this arises out of the fact that (as far as I can tell) the original page dimensions were measured from the PDF page width rather than the width of the page-image sitting inside the PDF. I think I have that problem basically solved (I had to recalculate about 400 margin-right settings).

However, we have another transformational nesting issue which is exemplified 45 times in Le Blanc, but also shows up in three other texts in the collection: <cit>/<quote> elements cross page boundaries, and therefore contain <fw> and <pb>, but in this context, <quote type="italic"> was converted into an XHTML <i> tag. Initially, I thought this was another case where we needed to split out the contents before the main transformation, but I began to re-think, because there's such a range of related phenomena, including the use of <blockquote>.

I've decided to go for even more divs and spans, eschewing more specialized XHTML elements, because it's easier to get valid structures in highly complicated documents this way; I can then control the display with CSS, making <div>s inline and <span>s block where required. This makes for valid documents (most of them validate now), which ensures that the rest of the CSS gets applied correctly.

LCC left a detailed list of issues to address in the Le Blanc text, and I've started on the first one, which involves the markup and rendering of the title page. Some fixes will be required in XSLT, and also the markup needs a bit of reconfiguring. <titlePart> elements do not seem to be processed as expected; instead of getting <h2> and <h3> tags, they're getting block-display <span>s, and I can't yet figure out how that's happening. It means their rend attributes are not being passed through.

Five of the engravings contain unusual glyphs used for abbreviation, and now the same has appeared in one of the regular texts, so I've documented the markup process for these glyphs, and passed the document on to LSPW so she can merge it into her growing markup documentation.

Tracked down a bunch of bugs, which EGB fixed, and the output now validates, after coming through our two-stage transform. Yay! From 406 errors to zero in a few days.

I've written an intermediary stylesheet to split out <list> elements containing <pb> and <fw> children into separate lists with the <pb>s and <fw>s outside them. This is processed prior to the main transformation, and has solved the problem for lists. I may revisit it for lg/l at some point. For the record, here's the template (the only non-pass-through template in an identity transform):

<!-- Split out interrupted lists into a sequence of lists with the interruptions

      between them. -->

  <xsl:template match="list[child::fw or child::pb]">

<!-- Stash a reference to the current list so we can easily refer to it in later nested code. -->

    <xsl:variable name="thisList" select="."/>

    <xsl:for-each-group select="child::item" group-adjacent="count(preceding-sibling::fw) + count(preceding-sibling::pb)">

        <list>

          <xsl:for-each select="$thisList/@*">

            <xsl:copy/>

          </xsl:for-each><xsl:text>

</xsl:text>

          <xsl:for-each select="current-group()">

            <xsl:copy-of select="."/><xsl:text>

</xsl:text>

          </xsl:for-each>

        </list><xsl:text>

</xsl:text>

      <xsl:variable name="lastItem" select="current-group()[position() = last()]"/>

          <xsl:for-each select="$lastItem/following-sibling::fw[preceding-sibling::item[1] = $lastItem] | $lastItem/following-sibling::pb[preceding-sibling::item[1] = $lastItem]">

            <xsl:copy-of select="."/><xsl:text>

</xsl:text>

          </xsl:for-each><xsl:text>

</xsl:text>

      </xsl:for-each-group>     

      

    

  </xsl:template>

Created a thumbnail image for the title page of Maladies des Femmes.

EDIT by MDH 2011-12-22: I believe both of these issues are now fixed. I wrote a template to split lists and it's now in use, and I think LSPW has fixed the erroneous @target attributes. Setting this task to Completed.

Several XHTML validation issues have arisen recently. They fall into the following categories:

• Unexpected elements inside lists. le_bon_mariage.xml has many instances of page breaks, and forme works which occur inside lists. The XSLT doesn't expect this, and outputs XHTML elements inside <ul> and <ol> which are of course invalid (only <li> is allowed).
• Duplicate ids in reference links. Reference links inside the text are provided with unique ids so that you can navigate to them, and these ids are constructed from the target id of the reference itself, followed by an underscore and a number; numbers are provided in sequence by counting preceding references. This is going wrong somehow, resulting in more than one reference link with the same id attribute in the XHTML.

The first requires a policy decision (do we allow other elements than item inside of list?), followed by fixes to the XML and/or the XSLT to deal with the consequences of the policy. The second seems to be caused by typos in the @target attributes of ref elements in the references file; I've identified a set of these and asked LSPW to fix them. The same kind of typos also show up in anthology documents, so I've identified a stack of them using XQuery and sent them to LSPW too.

NOTE: With regard to the first issue, I wrote to the TEI list, and had a number of useful responses; I think the most appropriate was to keep the current markup (which is, after all, "correct"), but use a two-stage transformation to get the document to XHTML. In the first stage, any lists bisected by page breaks, forme works etc. would be split into two lists, allowing the second transform to proceed appropriately. This is a really good idea, and could also be used to handle bisected lgs, which are currently output as <ul>/<li> sets if they're not bisected, or <div>/<span> sets if they are.

Following a meeting discussing contracts, working hours and future plans, we added LSPW's word-processor file, in which she's documenting the markup practices of the project, to the repo, in a new directory called documentation. It looks pretty comprehensive and extremely useful. I might just store it in the exist db so it could be made available on the site (although a PDF version would be more appropriate for that).

I've always been unhappy with the way original and modern transcriptions in the engravings are stored in separate annotations and linked to separate zones. I think a better approach would be to combine the two within one annotation, inside special divs that mark them as alternates:

<div type="transcription_alternates">
  <div type="transcription_orig">
    <p>[...]</p>
  </div>
  <div type="transcription_modern">
    <p>[...]</p>
  </div>
</div>

The XSLT could then provide a single pop-up annotation window with a choice of two tabs at the top or the bottom, so you could switch between them. It could even remember your preference (the last tab you looked at) in a cookie.

It might be possible to automate the conversion of the existing code to this new approach using XSLT; you'd have to identify zones which were equivalent (mostly overlapping), and rewrite the contents of the Transcription category so it contains both, then delete the modernized ones. I think this would definitely be a cleaner approach to providing both transcriptions.