→ Digital humanities

Maintained by: David J. Birnbaum (djbpitt@gmail.com) [Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 Unported License] Last modified: 2023-01-08T19:22:21+0000

XSLT assignment #6

The texts

Beginning in spring 2014 (2144), XML texts prepared by students in this course for their projects have been made available on GitHub (unless prohibited by copyright). You can find them by loading our Course projects page and clicking on the bracketed links labeled GitHub after the project titles. Because the XML texts for current (and some older) projects are under development, they may be inconsistently or incompletely marked up. As long as they are well formed, however, they can be explored with XML tools, including XSLT.

The assignment

Select an XML file from one of the projects and spend a few minutes looking at it to familiarize yourself with its overall structure. (Notice whether it’s in a namespace!) Explore the project GitHub repo and site to learn more about it. You may use your own XML files or someone else’s. Download an XML file from whichever project you choose and open it in <oXygen/>.

Downloading files from GitHub

The easiest way to download a file from GitHub is to clone the project onto your own machine, which will copy all files, and then open the file you need. If you want to download just one file (which is all you need for this assignment), you can’t just right-click and download because you’ll download a version with extraneous GitHub specific markup mixed into the file, which will render the file unusable for your purposes. What you can do instead is 1) connect to the repo in a browser; 2) click on the file you want, which will display its contents; 3) click on the button labeled Raw at the top of the code window, which will display its contents without any extraneous GitHub-specific material; and 4) either right-click and do a Save as or select all the text in the window, copy it to the clipboard, and paste it into a new XML document in <oXygen/>.

What to do with the file once you’ve downloaded it

Transform the XML into some form of HTML using XSLT, whether that’s a reading view or some sorts of lists or tables or other reports. You should decide yourself on the type of output you would find interesting or useful, but we encourage you to do something that is not trivial, and to use this assignment as an opportunity to practice—and receive feedback on—some feature of XSLT with which you would like to become more comfortable. If your output would benefit meaningfully from CSS, create a separate CSS file with the CSS rules. If you do that, your XSLT transformation must generate the <link> element that links to the CSS, just as you generate the <title> element inside the <head>.

What to submit

You should upload the XSLT stylesheet you created to run the transformation, the HTML it produced, and your CSS (if you used it). The XSLT must include meaningful comments, along the lines described in our first XSLT assignment. The HTML must be valid; if it isn’t, the XSLT must include, as properly formatted code comments, information about how you tried to debug your transformation.