Project Update #7

[hcasazza]

For today's meeting, we focused on our remaining markup, how we want to use xslt, html, and css, along with, how to upload files to our website. For our markup, we reviewed a couple new elements that we thought could be helpful within our document. Alongside this, though the markup is not complete, we thought it would be possible to begin using xslt with our markup for this upcoming week. One thing we mentioned with xslt is about creating a table of contents for our letters and adding hrefs to them to provide the user a quick and easy link to each of them. We also began discussing how to incorporate maps and graph data within our website. Looking at html and css, we discussed the navbar and troubles we had with expanding it across the page. We considered using flexbox as a helpful tool to accomplish this. There was some confusion on how to upload our files to our obdurodon website and we plan to reach out to the TAs or Professor Birnbaum to help in this issue.

[racheljfu]

I looked a little bit more at your project files and I think you guys are making good progress. My group has mostly finished markup, and we didn't use XSLT except for tokenizing our poems (and that was before we even started the XSLT unit). However, I think that using XSLT could significantly speed up the progress of markup, especially if you use techniques like with the @class and @span attributes that we recently learned about. For your website, I think Flexbox will really help too. I have been doing a lot of work on my group's website and I found flexbox very helpful, especially for making the menu.

[JeremyTygh]

Creating a table of contents for your letters is a great idea. Using hrefs to link to the corresponding letter would certainly make the user's life easier! We are working on implementing a similar feature in our website. In our last meeting, we also spent some time playing around with our navbar. It can definitely be tricky making it uniform, but Flexbox does make the task less of a headache. I am looking forward to seeing how these features look when finished!

[raisedDeadWizard]

Flexbox has been really pivotal to our website remaining good on all sizes of screen, it will be a great tool to keep your website looking great. Our group just started using xslt to convert our markup to xhtml for website display and it has been very nice, I would say if we end up adding more stories to our corpus, we will most likely use xslt to do markup faster. As far as putting thing on the obdurodon server, I personally use an ssh tool to access it easier, but I believe the TA's have an easier way to access, luckily its not too hard once you figure it out.

[djbpitt]

We recommend specific SFTP (file transfer) tools (Fetch for MacOS, SSH Secure Shell for Windows) because we're familiar with them, so if you run into problems, we can advise. If you're comfortable with an alternative tool (as Jagr is; see above), it's fine to use that, although if something goes wrong, the instructors won't know how to help.