Map Of London

On Friday we deployed a new version of the VNU validator, and the fallout was significant, since it now appears to be checking all CSS thoroughly. This is great, but it found hundreds of errors, and I've spent the day fixing them and attempting to implement Schematron to prevent as many of them as possible.

Spent most of the day working on the HTML diagnostics, which I think are now done, at least in the XSLT 2.0 version. I've split the build into multiple targets and it runs quite smoothly. While I originally used regexes to see if a file exists locally, I've decided to just do it by sequence checking (i.e. $fileSequence[.=$thisFile]). After a certain point the regex becomes too slow whereas this is consistently quick.

Ran this on MoEML (15 minutes) and Graves (1.5 minutes) and the results are interesting. MoEML has a ton of broken links, particularly in the Ajax pages, that MH and I will need to discuss; Graves also has some broken links, but only on the gallery pages. From what I can tell, the titles are being processed by templates, but no appendix content is being created; we could decide to either just take the text, apply templates to the title in a different mode, or add an appendix to these pages.

I think there's some kind of bug in the way that successive animations (particularly if the last of them is ol.View.fit rather than ol.View.animate) are run in the current version of OL, such that the starting point of the final animation is not the ending point of the preceding one, but the previous zoom level. So the effect of zooming out and zooming back in again is to zoom out, but then jump back in to a close zoom, then pan to fit the target extent. That's jarring. I've tried every solution I can imagine, including precompose and postcompose scenarios, setTimeout to postpone the final animation, and many other permutations, but nothing works nicely. So instead I've included a little overview map that shows you where in the main map you are. That's the best I can do for now. When OL has gone through another couple of releases, we'll see if the animations chain better.

Tweaked the rendering of a box-selected area so that it zooms gently into place, rather than snaps as before. Then tried three or four more approaches to the zoom-out-zoom-in functionality without success. I still have one idea...

Lots of work prepping for the release:

• GOSS2: Changed a random linegroup that was styled to look like an epigraph into an actual epigraph using cit and quote
• QMPS1: Split the document into two (QMPS1_introduction and QMPS1), linked them together in the usual ways, and fixed a lot of odd encoding in QMPS1
• LINKS1: Fixed the links so that they actually appeared on the left hand side of the XHTML, which wasn't happening before
• BIBL1: Fixed a number of typos and added schematron to catch bad spaces in authors, editors, et cetera.

Also chatted with JJ about plans going forward as well as MAPS1, which raised a lot of questions about the document. Did some investigation and wrote a long explanation with possible problems and solutions to JJ and AR

Mostly working on the Bills of Mortality finding aid; cross-referenced it with the TCP's huge JSON and added links to TCP and ESTC.

Today:

• Polished many straightforward errors from diagnostics.
• Made some tweaks to diagnostics that removed thousands more.
• Fixed several hundred uses of CSS in one born-digital document.
• Rewrote the XSLT to handle display of documents in peer review (not tested yet; waiting on Jenkins)
• Replaced the requirement to provide an image for the latest news story with a default image instead, per JJ.
• Tweaked the rendering of citations in MLA to comply with MLA 8.

Ported over the XSL schematron pipeline to MoEML, which is working nicely. What's nice about this is that we now have the TEI schematron embedded into MoEML's own schematron, which is quite nice.

I've changed the main build (london/build.xml) to use the XSLT created by the schematron process and everything seems to be fine. It is very slightly slower than the schematron ant task, but it much nicer since the error messages fail the build immediately, rather than waiting for Jenkins to parse the "ERROR" output.

Met with JJ and MK to discuss mayoral pageants plans. JJ and MK are looking into facsimiles and may have found a potential one, which is exciting. Discussed plans going forward and how and if we should do the embedded transcription. MK is going to experiment with FAME2 to see if it's worthwhile while I continue tinkering with some code to turn our semi-diplomatic transcriptions into surfaces, zones, and lines.

One issue that still needs to be resolved, however, is file naming practices. Is it right to keep the diplomatic transcription as, for example, FAME2 or should it be FAME2_diplomatic and FAME2_modern? And if users go to FAME2.htm, what should they get? It seems intuitive for them to get FAME2_index, but we'll need to discuss that further.