Comments on: Done well: WALS Online

By: Have you heard of World Atlas of Language Structures online? « Anthropology.net

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 04:32:49 +0000

[...] World Atlas of Language Structures Online (WALS) database release. Following suite was Mark from The Ideophone, and Simon from HENRY. All three are lingustic anthropology focused blogs that I follow and trust, [...]

By: robert forkel

robert forkel — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:14:12 +0000

ok. i see. your comments target the chapter texts, mainly. we actually do plan on overhauling these (Testing HTML descriptions). the way they are right now is because we use openoffice to convert word documents to html. some editing tasks are still easier to do in openoffice. but once we stop doing this, we can actually improve the html by hand. we will have to do this anyway, because the automatic linking of references and languages is far from perfect. so we'll try to improve the chapter texts over time, which will also be a chance to tag the languages.

By: Mark Dingemanse

Mark Dingemanse — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:40:59 +0000

Also, frequent use of !important in CSS declarations usually indicates that the cascading powers of CSS are not really being harnessed to any serious extent. This in turn means loss of future flexibility and ease of use.

The more I look at it, the more I think that the HTML/CSS really could use a major revamping. That, or it is going to be a pain in the ass in the future.

By: Mark Dingemanse

Mark Dingemanse — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:04:55 +0000

Robert, thanks for your comments. By 'tagging language data' I simply meant using the lang attribute where possible (or its XML cousin xml:lang if you would be coding XHTML). In some places (e.g. the references, but strangely enough not the feature or language pages) I've seen a default lang="en" on the body element, but it would be good, I think, to go a little further and tag example sentences in the chapters with the proper language attributes. It's as simple as tacking a lang="ISOcode" attribute on the HTML element containing the stuff. One project which does this consistently is Verba Africana, for example in the Ewe story Headless Crabs. For more details on that example, see the Verba Africana technical notes. (I did the graphics, code, and I18N for that project.) A good reference is the W3C I18N FAQ. That page also notes that IE, unfortunately and stupidly, does not support styling using the :lang CSS pseudo-selector, rendering a redundant use of generic CSS classes necessary (if IE would've supported it, the CSS really could have been dramatically simplified). BTW, another question about the CSS: what's with all the .Px CSS selectors? A lot of the CSS rules targeting them are exactly the same. Looks like someone forgot that one can target a CSS declaration at several selectors at once, as in .P3, .P4, .P8 { font-family:'Charis SIL','Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande','Arial Unicode MS'; text-align:justify } ...

By: robert forkel

robert forkel — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:15:02 +0000

and once more (i’m reading the post in stages):

what do you mean with “tagging language data”? tagging the glosses/examples in the chapter texts? i was actually looking for some sort markup standard for these, but didn’t find any. could you propose something?

By: robert forkel

robert forkel — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:08:06 +0000

oh, and some background about the reference linking: the links from chapter texts to references have so far been inserted automatically, which isn’t perfect as you noticed. it’s even worse for the linking of languages, genera and family. that’s why we plan on polishing the chapter texts manually over time (see the milestone).

another problem regarding the reference linking: so far, in the reference database we have only the references cited for individual value assignments from the cd-rom. the set of references cited in the chapter texts is different from this, although largely overlapping. this is why you find references cited in chapter texts which are not present in the reference database.

it’s actually even more complicated: since the two sets of references (from book and cd-rom) are different, it may even happen that the same citation keys (e.g. “Dryer 1998b”) refer to different references.

so essentially, it isn’t perfect yet. but we hope to improve and are thankful for bug reports.

By: robert forkel

robert forkel — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:30:24 +0000

thanx for the report – almost saves us the work of writing a better help! i’ll see to include the improvements you mentioned; but the big overview map of all languages may have to wait: at the moment most browsers’ javascript implementations have a hard time dealing with 2500 markers on a google map.