https://github.com/TEI-Boilerplate/TEI-Boilerplate
#About TEI Boilerplate
TEI Boilerplate (http://teiboilerplate.org/) is a lightweight solution for publishing styled TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) P5 content directly in modern browsers. With TEI Boilerplate, TEI XML files can be served directly to the web without server-side processing or translation to HTML. Our TEI Boilerplate Demo illustrates many TEI features rendered by TEI Boilerplate.
#Browser Compatibility
TEI Boilerplate requires a robust, modern browser to do its work. It is compatible with current versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer.
Note: For security reasons, some browsers (e.g., Chrome) will not process the XSLT transformation when the TEI document is opened from the local file system. Chrome does work fine when the TEI files are delivered through a Web server, including localhost.
If you have problems with TEI Boilerplate with a modern browser, please let us know by filing a bug report or feature request at http://github.com/GrantLS/TEI-Boilerplate/issues.
#Introduction
TEI is an XML-based language for describing and analyzing literary texts and other documents of interest to humanities scholars. Although TEI provides mechanisms for describing the design, presentational, and material features of the source document, projects and individual scholars that use TEI are responsible for developing their own methods, or implementing existing solutions, for converting the TEI to a presentation-ready state for the web or print (Rahtz, 2012). Two potential paths to reach this goal are:
- Transforming TEI to HTML using XSLT and styling the HTML output with CSS.
- Styling the TEI directly with CSS by referencing a CSS stylesheet from within the TEI document.
Both of these approaches have advantages and disadvantages. Although HTML is the language of the web and, as such, is well supported by browsers, HTML’s descriptive capabilities are much less expressive than TEI’s. When TEI is transformed to HTML, much of the richness of the TEI is lost or obscured in the resulting HTML. However, the browser understands HTML very well and knows, for example, when to initiate retrieval of a document based on certain user events, such as clicking a link. The second option, CSS-styled TEI, delivers the TEI document directly to the browser. However, while the browser may apply CSS to format and style a TEI document, the browser doesnot understand the semantics of TEI. For instance, the browser does not understand that TEI’s <ptr> and <ref> elements are linking elements.
TEI Boilerplate bridges the gap between these two approaches by making use of the built-in XSLT (1.0) capabilities of browsers to embed the TEI XML, with minimal modifications, within an HTML5 shell document. Features expected of web documents, such as clickable links and display of linked images, are enabled through selective transformation of a very small number of TEI elements and attributes. Both the HTML5 shell and the embedded TEI are styled using CSS.
TEI Boilerplate is not intended to be a replacement for the many excellent XSLT solutions for publishing and displaying TEI/XML on the web. It is intended to be a simple and lightweight alternative to more complex XSLT solutions. There are both practical and theoretical advantages to this lightweight approach.
#Using it in Your Project
Download the TEI Boilerplate files, and host the dist directory on a web server.
The simplest way to use TEI Boilerplate (TEIBP) is simply to add your TEI files to the dist/content directory of TEI Boilerplate and include the following xml-stylesheet processing instruction at the top of your TEI documents, after the XML declaration and before the root <TEI> element:
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="teibp.xsl"?>
You may then access your TEI files from a modern browser and see the resulting styled document.