ALEG

What I've done

• Only a half week, so not that much...

• Added a little what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor to the maintenance screens. Rather than entering lots of text and markup in notes, abstract, bio fields, you can press the icon which looks like a pen next to these fields, and a mini-editor will pop up. It allows basic markup - bold, italic, underline, lists (dot and numbered), indenting, left/right/centre alignment. It is possible to add more tools, but we probably don't want these fields to have a great deal of markup.

  Pressing "enter" creates a new paragraph (just like MS-Word). If you really want a newline, use "CTRL+Enter", but you probably don't, as remember this output is going to be formatted in a browser using a font and screen dimensions set by the user. (OK, so HTML isn't/can't be WYSIWYG...)

  I thought this would be quick and easy, having done something similiar before with IE5, but guess what - the "old" IE4/5 way of doing this using something called a DHTML edit control has been deprecated in favour of the new, improved MSHTML control. In fact, so deprecated that the old DHTML samples supplied by Microsoft don't work in IE5.5! So, it required a bit more experimentation and trial and error to get something working.

• Updated the edit/maintenance/data storage code to cope with text fields with embedded HT/XML markup. The main issue was the creation of the XML representation of the topic: previously notes, abstract, etc where treated as simple text nodes, but now they can be "mixed content" - text and/or markup. Changed the prototype stylesheet to cope with this too.

• Spent a few hours tracking down an annoying but obvious in hindsight bug which caused updated attributes to be updated correctly on the database, but not in the "cached" copy of the topic in the web server.

• Started with the work/expr/manifestation editting, but haven't got very far. Added the ability to show and search for works. Restructured the XML representation of a work so that reviewed works and "reviewed By" references are now just attributes of a work, rather than something special. Previously, the "reviewedBy" element was a direct descendent of the work it pertained to. Now it is a descendent of the work's "attributes" element, which makes things a lot simplier in the editing suite. Updated the prototype stylesheet to reflect this change.

• Document how ALEG will handle some tricky cases - The "Poets of the Month" works from the mid 1970's and "Down the Lake with Half a Chook". These are amongst the most "difficult" cases Tessa and Kathy can come up with, so if we think the proposed data model can handle these, we'll be happy!

• Continue implementation of the work/expression/manifestation maintenance interface.

• OK - try to get as much done in the editing suite next week, as I'm sure the BAL/LAW conversion will take a lot of time.