In the first three parts of this technology update (here, here, and here), I described the technology I used for the Hoyle bibliography. The bibliographical descriptions are stored in XML and transformed by browsers into HTML using the transformation language XSL. Recent technology announcements have modified my approach slightly.
Major browsers, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari have announced or are considering plans to abandon native XSL support. So I will no longer be able to upload files in XML format and have them display properly on the web. The good news is that I am able to use my XML authoring tool (oXygen) to transform the XML to HTML using my current XSL (with an exception noted below). Then I can upload the HTML files to my website.
That work is done. The bibliography is up and running in HTML format here.
The exception: The only time-consuming work was internal links which had to be changed to point to HTML versions of files instead of XML versions. For example, from the main page you can click on the first link, A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist to see a list of eight authorized and four pirated versions of Hoyle's Whist. That link needed to change from https://booksongaming.com/hoyle/bibliography/10.1.xml to .html. Similarly, the link for the first edition of Whist had to change from https://booksongaming.com/hoyle/bibliography/books/whist.1.1.xml to. html. I made those changes programmatically in the XSL files so I needed to touch only a few parts of the code.
I will need to go through this blog and change pointers to the bibliography, but that will be done more slowly. If you click on a link to the bibliography and get a "file not found" message, just change the .xml at the end of the url to .html.
Posts
