Ariana,
We are looking into XML/XSLT, but in the
case of text fields (curatorial remarks, provenance, etc), paragraph breaks,
italics and other elements requiring tags are embedded in text fields, and so
can’t be addressed individually afterwards.
But if there is some way in XSLT to manage
“character entities” – I guess that means formatting them on
the fly – I need to find out. Thanks!
From:
Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2008
5:42 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Text fields and
publishing to the web
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:
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
MRC 707,
tel: 202-633-0348 / fax: 202-633-9770