Week 23: XSLT, METS, JavaScript, oh my!!

So, this week I seemed to have dabbled with a bunch of things.  I continued reading from 'XSLT Quickly' by Bob DuCharme and got as far as adding and deleting elements.  But as it turns out, I actually won't be writing the XSLT for transformation.  It seems the programmers want to use Java and want to do this transformation themselves.  So, I will just write a draft XSLT anyway for the practice, although it won't be used. 

I then got my METS experience for the week by updating the METS comparison documentation ever so slightly so that the wording is a little more clear. 

Then, since I have to wait to hear from Michelle about my next step, I decided to finally sit down and do some JavaScript tutorial work.  I want to eventually use JavaScript for my Hildegard project, so since I had the time I decided it was the perfect moment.  I spent about 3 hours working on that.  I used the W3 schools site for that: www.w3schools.com/js/js_intro.asp .  I really like their tutorials.  They're not super comprehensive, but they are good basic starting off points. 

I also attended the Digital Library Brown Bag.  This week, DLP's own Julie Hardesty gave the talk.  She is the Metadata Analyst/Librarian here, and she and I worked together on the ICO/Photocat project. Her presentation was on the IU Libraries' using CSS media queries to offer mobile-ready access to online digital collections.  I liked how she had us take out our smartphones (if we had them) and compare the different displays and how the page was rendered.  Apparently, there are two ways a mobile phone can display a web page.   One is to create a completely separate site, a mobile site.  You can tell if a site is a mobile site by whether or not an 'm.' is located in front of the rest of the URL.  Or, the CSS can be written to automatically render the display so that it can fit the screen, whether it is on an iPhone, Android or iPad.  This was an interesting talk and at the end Julie read a funny poem she wrote called 'Making Mobile Meaningful' that was written using only words starting with 'm'.  Clever!