Scandinavian-Canadian Studies

Received updated abstracts for Waerp paper. The English one is the same as what was already in place, but the French one is new. Added that one.

The bug fix described here turned out to have been inadequate; that code has now been replaced with this:

<xsl:choose>
            <xsl:when test="$PutDateAfterAuthor = 'true'">
            <xsl:if test="(string-length($TheParent/imprint) > 0) and (string-length($TheParent/imprint) != string-length($TheParent/imprint/date))">
            <xsl:text>. </xsl:text>
                </xsl:if>
            </xsl:when>
            <xsl:otherwise>
                <xsl:if test="(string-length($TheParent/imprint) > 0)"><xsl:text>. </xsl:text></xsl:if>
            </xsl:otherwise>
        </xsl:choose>

In addition, I noticed that when an article title in a reference ended in a question mark, the following part of the reference ran on immediately, without an intervening space. To fix this, I changed this:

<xsl:if test="not(substring($InTitle/text(), string-length($InTitle/text()))='?')"><xsl:text>. </xsl:text></xsl:if>

to this:

<xsl:if test="not(substring($InTitle/text(), string-length($InTitle/text()))='?')"><xsl:text>.</xsl:text></xsl:if><xsl:text> </xsl:text>

There is still a potential problem with titles ending in exclamation marks, though. We may have to come back to this.

All of these changes were made in both the XHTML and PDF rendering libraries.

Following the site redesign, I had to rewrite the code which detects old versions of IE and reformats the display for them. It does this by forcing all the major components of the page to position: absolute and laying them out in code. I also added a warning that display might not be right with old versions of IE; this only shows up with IE6 or earlier. The display now seems to work fine on IE6. Also tweaked the XHTML display of articles to remove the top bar and footer.

This page on the AASSC site currently has the old information for the journal (prior to John's taking over as editor). I wrote to the site maintainer to ask if the info can be replaced with a pointer to our page here, or whether the info on their site can be updated.

The About page was missing email addresses for submission and subscription; I'd neglected to convert them from TEI tags to HTML.

Made a good start on cleaning up and prettifying the Website:

• Experimented with a gradient background on the menu links, and decided against it. Instead, I put a smaller version of the map in the background of the menu, and made the links appear as buttons which stick down when pressed.
• Removed the top bar and footer. A few people had commented that the footer, which was fixed at the bottom of the screen, could be confusing, because it wasn't clear that more of the page content was hidden behind it and could only be accessed by scrolling. I decided the top and bottom bars were better removed, so the content now extends from top to bottom.
• Rewrote the Authors page. The tabular layout was cluttered, so I've gone for a regular unordered list, with the bio and the articles appearing directly below the author. There are still some inconsistencies in the display of borders on list items -- Safari doesn't show them -- and support for the CSS first-child and last-child pseudo-classes, but it looks OK on all the browsers except for IE6, which is predictably a complete mess. IE6 will probably need its own stylesheet.
• Added a credits page, to include the information that used to be in the footer, in more detail.
• Added an About page, which I took from the info on the title page verso of Vol 15. This is in both English and French, so I arranged the two languages side by side in columns, using left and right floats. This raises the issue of whether the whole site should be bilingual; we should consider this.

Spent some time researching the options for a licence under which articles published on the site could be released. I recommended the "Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License", here. Wrote to John and Trish to raise the issue. This is something we need to address soon.

Now that we're into the second volume, we have enough documents in the db, and the server is stable, it's time to work on the appearance of the site a little. I started by doing a simple re-working of the menu. I'll continue hacking at this over the next few weeks.

The old site on Mustard is now obsolete, so I've implemented redirects in the sitemap so that anyone accessing it is automatically taken to the relevant page of the new site. This is the code:

<map:match pattern="*">
        <map:redirect-to uri="http://lettuce.tapor.uvic.ca/cocoon/journals/scancan/{1}" />
      </map:match>

Addressed this bug: "In the Farfan article, there are reference items which have no publisher or publication place, but because they have a publication date, the <imprint> tag is not empty, so a period is triggered (see line 284 of tei_scancan_xhtml_bibliography.xsl for instance). However, the date has been shifted to after the author, so there's no need for the period. Figure this one out. Perhaps a test on whether the date has been shifted would be appropriate."

I fixed the problem by elaborating the test which attempts to determine if there is any usable content in the <imprint> tag, as follows:

<xsl:if test="(string-length($TheParent/imprint) > 0) and
            ((string-length($TheParent/imprint) != string-length($TheParent/imprint/date)) and ($PutDateAfterAuthor != 'true'))"><xsl:text>. </xsl:text></xsl:if>

This change appears in both the PDF and XHTML rendering code.