Oracc Notes and News: August 2010

Monday, 23 August 2010

Qcat overhauled

The Qcat—the catalogue of compositions—has now been radically rationalised, tidied up and documented. In particular, the naming conventions for the designations (the prose equivalents of the Q-numbers) have been standardised.

If your project uses the Qcat, you may find that you will need to revise your project's Q designations accordingly. If you use a Filemaker database or similar for your catalogue, I can send you a list of new designations to import, overwriting the old ones. Just email me.

If and when your project needs new Q-numbers, send me a list of your proposed designations and other relevant fields (as per the documentation); or ask me for a clone of the Filemaker Qcat database, to fill in and email back to me.

If you ever notice mistakes, duplicates or omissions in the Qcat, or have any questions about it, please email me about that too.

Tuesday, 17 August 2010

If your project page loses its styling ...

There is a problem with the redirection the Oracc server currently does that
I can't fix for the moment, but there is a straightforward solution.

The problem only affects projects whose pages contains relative links.
In such pages, you will see a different behaviour depending on whether you
ask for:

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/dcclt/

or

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/dcclt

The first version, with the trailing /, works correctly; the second fails to find
styling, images and any other relative links.

The solution is to specify the URL base explicitly in the home page (and
any other pages this problem affects). This is quite straightforward: just
add the <base> tag to the <head> part of the page; in the href
attribute, give the path with trailing slash. Here is what the header of
the DCCLT home page now looks like:

<head>
<base href="http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/dcclt/"/>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content=
"text/html; charset=us-ascii" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="dcclt.css" />
<title>DCCLT - Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts</title>
</head>

I have already fixed this in several projects (HBTIN, SAA, DCCLT), but
I haven't checked all projects to see if they need the fix.