HCMC Journal

Proposed enhancements to Servitengasse TNG

27 June 2025 to 31 July 2025: Martin Holmes
Minutes: 70

The canonical Servitengasse dataset is now the TEI XML in the servitengasse_tng repository, and the database should no longer be considered as a data source; HT confirms that she no longer needs it, since she has the original spreadsheets. The new build process now produces valid sites, and is ready to handle the next release. However, the output is still similar to the original site, and there are many optimizations and enhancements which we might take the opportunity to carry out.

Annoyances with the map:

• The weird location of the menu on the map page was a problem, but as of 2025-07-08 MH has now overridden some of the BreezeMap JS to add a normal menu to the top of the page. However, it’s too long for a mobile view, so the original floating menu reappears to replace it. Is this acceptable, or should something more sophisticated be done with the menu on mobile?
• The taxonomy drop-down on the map page has an infelicity whereby when you choose the (longer) Buildings taxonomy, the triangle symbol which signals its function overlaps with the caption, presumably because the element size does not change when the caption changes. Giving it min-width: 6.5em; fixed this in rev 125.
• The close button on the Read more… dialog in the map overlaps the project title. Fixed in rev 126.
• The menu on the Read more… dialog is unnecessary since the map page should have a proper menu, so it could be hidden (and perhaps the close button relocated to its right-side place). Fixed in rev 126.
• The Show names list control in Read more… person pages should be suppressed in the context of the map; when you see the names list, you would expect that choosing one would place it on the map, but of course that’s not what happens. Fixed in rev 126.
• OpenLayers and BreezeMap should probably both be updated (which will also require some JS and CSS fixes, and possible rewrites of myu recent fixes).
• There is a strange hard-coded heading Accessing Information in the category panel; a default BreezeMap install would have Categories there, and it’s clear that’s in appropriate, but Accessing Information is a bit weird and perhaps misleading.
• We need to decide on the final tileset we’re going to use. The site currently uses cartodb, and must be registered somehow for that; it works running a local development server on a machine at UVic but not from home. It would be ideal to use a vector tileset of our own if we could. But at the very least, we should document how the permissions were obtained and configured for this.
• The original site made no mention of the household information in the dataset; as of 2025-07-08, this info is now displayed on the individual person pages, but it can be suppressed with a build parameter if HT decides not to include it.

Other things to address, and nice-to-have features:

• We need a favicon. Suggest something related to the key motif.
• The documentation needs to be expanded to explain how to add and remove people, and what all the various residence and event items in a person record mean.
• The documentation needs to explain exactly how to rebuild the whole thing and publish it, or just publish a new year which is already waiting on the server if there have been no changes to the data since last year.
• GN and I have dreamed of adding a new feature to the map (or perhaps a new map) which would show all the tracks of people from Servitengasse to their eventual destinations, in some sort of animated form.
• There are a few CSS errors and warnings that mostly come from using vendor-prefixed property names which are no longer needed.
• There is a strange and pointless-looking fetch.js file which could probably be completely eliminated. Its only function, jsIncludeFile(), doesn’t seem to be called from anywhere, and probably shouldn’t be, judging by its contents. Removed in rev 127.