Re: [gutvol-d] More than you ever wanted to know about XHTML and CSS
----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Shimmin" <shimmin@uiuc.edu>
The "standardization" is there ... it just doesn't go as far as to specify a standard style sheet.
Now, the TEI has a "working" standard style sheet, but there have already been some changes identified in testing.
Once, we have the final transforms worked out, I plan on having an open call for style sheets on DP.
I've worked on enough 'quirky' projects to think this a bad idea. The typesetters of the past did things that often make it a complete judgment call where the content stops and the presentation begins, and many projects will not fit on someone else's Procrustean notions of how a PG project 'should' be styled.
From my experience, this is not the case and I've put together some very quirky ones into TEI already. I've picked one text with over 1,000 footnotes and over 500 sidenotes. It is complicated, but it renders beautifully. I've picked another text that uses editorial sidenotes running throughout a Middle English poem.
Both of these were great test cases that helped us identify bugs in the transform. Now, this isn't to say the layout looks exactly like the original. It does not in many cases. A sidenote in the margin is functionally the same as a sidenote that is floated as an inset on the side of the page. Worrying that the presentation of one matches the original book and one doesn't is irrelevant. The publisher probably didn't slavishly follow the layout the author wrote his original manuscript in either. Now, do I agree that we will eventually find something that goes beyond what we've covered in the TEI spec? You better believe we will. But when that day comes, TEI can be expanded to cover the situation. Do I think this will be a common occurance? Not a chance. Josh
Now, do I agree that we will eventually find something that goes beyond what we've covered in the TEI spec? You better believe we will. But when that day comes, TEI can be expanded to cover the situation. Do I think this will be a common occurance? Not a chance.
This is just off the top of the stack of projects I would like to put through DP, but hold off on because they contain elements I consider presently unmanageable. http://www.ews.uiuc.edu/~shimmin/almanac.PNG Today, if I could figure out a good way to handle it, I would write some styling for it, submit it, and be done with it. Tomorrow, I will have to bug some element of the PG bureaucracy to patch my styling into their code, which it may not be compatible with, or may disagree with their notions of markup elegance. A tool that works 90% of the time is a wonderful thing. A rule that works 90% of the time is not. -- RS
Robert Shimmin wrote:
This is just off the top of the stack of projects I would like to put through DP, but hold off on because they contain elements I consider presently unmanageable.
I don't see any problem with this. The text inside the wheel can easily be encoded in TEI and the whole thing can be added as illustration. OTOH if you want to get fancy you can encode the wheel in SVG and embed the SVG in TEI. Yes, you _can_ and we _already_ support that. If the browser groks SVG, the SVG code will be rendered by the browser, if not a pre-rendered image will be displayed instead. So it seems to me, that SVG/TEI is an even better choice than SVG/XHTML, because it saves you the trouble to create the fallback image manually. Thinking ahead, on the day when all PG TEI files will be stored in an XML database your readers will be able to do some fancy queries like: "show me all the texts which reference the date: Feb 24". If you have encoded the date like this: <date value="1555-02-24" rend="italic"><name reg="Matthias, St.">S. Mathies</name> day</date> the user will find your text. In a HTML file it will not find that date (not even the Saint).
Today, if I could figure out a good way to handle it, I would write some styling for it, submit it, and be done with it. Tomorrow, I will have to bug some element of the PG bureaucracy to patch my styling into their code, which it may not be compatible with, or may disagree with their notions of markup elegance.
Wrong. If you want to do your project in TEI, fine. Into the bargain you'll get HTML, TXT and PDF output from a single file, and more formats will follow. If you want to stick to the status quo, also fine. You'll have to do HTML and TXT manually and will nearly double your work and the work of the maintainers but you'll get a slightly better-looking text (in your opinion, that is). Sadly, people today take more pride in a good-looking text than in an error-free and usable one. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org
participants (3)
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Joshua Hutchinson -
Marcello Perathoner -
Robert Shimmin