Accessing our archival and manuscript heritage

1. Accessing our archival and manuscript heritage Backend system Steering group meeting Oct 2004 Richard Butterworth Accessing our archival and manuscript heritage

2. Overview... • Architecture • Maintainable mark up • Browser proofing • Dead link spotting • Glossary Accessing our archival and manuscript heritage

3. Architecture... HTML pages Nightly processing Maintainers Users Content Present- ation Dynamic content Accessing our archival and manuscript heritage

4. Maintainable mark up... • A simple, cut down version of HTML... • Trading flexibility against complexity • A nice easy to use editor • like Dreamweaver, but not nearly as complex • Good documentation, and example pages... • XML dialect, therefore portable and compatible... Accessing our archival and manuscript heritage

5. Browser proofing • SENDA compliance is ‘simply’ a matter of splitting content from presentation • HTML4 and CSS • But there’s a problem... Accessing our archival and manuscript heritage

6. Browser proofing... MIE6 friendly document HTML4 CSS document SHMML document Pre-processor Anything else we feel like Accessing our archival and manuscript heritage

7. Dead link spotting... • Usually in HTML... • <a href=“http://someaddress/”>Link</a> • In SHMML... • <as> • <address=“http://someaddress/”> • <address=“http://anotheraddress/”> • <address=“http://yetanotheraddress/”> • Link • </as> • The first working link is used... Accessing our archival and manuscript heritage

8. Glossary... • Glossary of terms stored in XML file... • Automatically marked up into the web pages... • Change the glossary, changes automatically propagate to the web pages... Accessing our archival and manuscript heritage

9. Summary • Hide as much complexity from the maintainers as possible... • Get the system to spot problems and warn the maintainers... • Clearly document what the maintainers have to do to support the system... Accessing our archival and manuscript heritage