Hi Jeffrey,

This is theoretical, but I don’t see why it couldn’t work: Have you tried going the XSL/XML route? You could get your TMS data into XSL/XML, apply your styles there, and then output it into HTML. In XSLT you could also define your character entities to manage any diacritics. I would think that the actual TMS data should stay as “un-styled” as possible, to maximize formatting & style possibilities down the line.

All the best,

Ariana

From: The Museum System (TMS) Users [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Smith, Jeffrey
Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2008 5:21 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Text fields and publishing to the web

The Freer-Sackler currently uses one of the Text Entry fields for it’s public access label copy, so we can add web tags for formatting, including special characters. But we certainly can’t do this for every field which we’d like to publish. We’re working now on provenance data, and are trying to come up with a format that won’t require tags, but won’t get mangled in translation from SQL to HTML.

I’m curious to hear how others are grappling with this problem, which looms large for us!

Also, when TMS becomes fully unicode compliant, will this mean that formatting (italics, bold, line breaks) will be recognized by the HTML? I haven’t been able to get an answer about this.

Thanks for any responses,

- Jeff

Jeffrey Smith

Assistant Registrar for Collections Information

Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

1050 Independence Avenue SW

MRC 707, P.O. Box 37012

Washington, DC 20013-7012

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tel: 202-633-0348 / fax: 202-633-9770