Conversion Commons

Expect to discuss the details of any conversion process as a part of a DHQ production cycle on the dhq-production list (see Development#dhq_production_mailing_list).

Tools and methods of more general usefulness (apart from any production cycle, or outside DHQ) can be proposed and discussed on dhq-tech (see Development#dhq_tech_mailing_list).

This wiki page is a cupboard for stashing useful stylesheets and utilities mostly in the latter category (but not necessarily).

TEI display stylesheet

We are hoping and expecting to receive submissions in TEI, which may come without their own display stylesheets. Occasionally we'll need to see this stuff in a web browser, requiring an HTML conversion. But it does no good to customize a general-purpose suite of TEI stylesheets, since our input is too open-ended: we don't know what flavor of TEI it may be. We need something lightweight, which works most of the time for most basic things, and which is easily customizable, adaptable and extensible to new structures.

This stylesheet:

• Is fairly lightweight
• Supports a great diversity of input fairly gracefully
• Can be easily tuned, modified or extended at either CSS or XSLT layers

Note that it also includes code to handle one of the more difficult problems in TEI to HTML conversion, namely the divergence in modeling between TEI's "rhetorical paragraph" and HTML's "presentational paragraph". This divergence is evident in HTML's rule that p may not contain lists, whereas TEI p may. This presents the conversion specialist with a problem for which XSLT 1.0 has no useful native constructs (solutions are possible, but are both cumbersome to build and maintain, and difficult to extend). This XSLT 2.0 stylesheet uses XSLT's new grouping constructs to solve this problem much more easily and cleanly.

Developed and tested with Saxon 8.

• TEItoHTMLdisplay.xsl: Basic TEI display in HTML - XSLT v2.0
• DHQ-TEI-html.css: CSS stylesheet to go w/ HTML result of TEItoHTML? XSLT

-- WendellPiez - 12 Feb 2006