Apologies for my late entry into this debate; I have come into the office
briefly in the middle of my leave today so will fall silent again after
this.
We can produce HTML documents from the database (this is how our thesaurus
web site has been implemented), but there are so many separate documents
(one for each class and one for each term) it was felt that it would be
difficult to distribute these electronically, and we did not have the time
to modify the programs.
We also considered putting the thesaurus on a 'test' area of our website,
only available to those with the URL, but as this is the main English
Heritage site, hosted externally, we don't have access to make the sort of
rapid updates which would be necessary.
For future distribution, a colleague is looking into the feasibility of
using WINZIP to distribute the files if it can preserve the directory
structure. Failing that, I will look at the programs again and produce a
version which puts all the alpha entries into a single document (really only
feasible because this is not a large thesaurus, otherwise the document gets
too long for use with a browser).
In the long term, I would like to overhaul the thesaurus programs so that
the output for the website is XML rather than HTML, and would be grateful
for any input from Richard Light to this process.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Daphne Charles Tel: +44 1793
414894
Senior Developer Fax: +44
1793 414906
National Monuments Record Centre
Email: [log in to unmask]
English Heritage
Kemble Drive, Swindon, Wilts SN2 2GZ
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|