] >
In XHTML (and HTML) there are tags called Meta-elements which are used to provide meta-data about a web page. Meta-data is data about data, so in this case meta-elements provide information about your web-page, for example: The 'keywords' meta-element allows you to provide keywords which are used by search engines to find websites.
Meta-elements are always found in the head section of a webpage, are stand-alone tags (They don't have a closing tag so the opening tag must close), and are treated specially by the glosser. In XHTML they look like so:
<meta name="keywords" content="gloss" />
Although the information within a meta-element is written as if it were an attribute to a tag in XHTML, we do not use the @ notation. Instead, a meta-element would look like so:
html { head { keywords [keyword1, keyword2] } body { ... } }
The glosser recognises we want a meta-element and will treat the tag differently.
Some metadata is provided by using the XHTML <link>
tag, with a hyperreference.
This can be conveniently entered in Gloss using the form KEY ~linkurl
. Examples are
given below.
As with the Section.modes, Theorem.modes and Hyperref.modes, meta.modes is included in the xhtml MV file.
These modes provide special meta-elements written for the Gloss system that allow for easy application of a 'navigation bar' and extra information regarding the author and such. The modes are outlined below:
Meta-element Name | Description | Example |
---|---|---|
home | Link to home document in group | home ~location |
glossary | Link to glossary document in group | glossary ~location |
contents | Link to contents document in group | contents ~location |
index | Link to index document in group | index ~location |
first | Link to first document in group | first ~location |
next | Link to next document in group | next ~location |
previous | Link to contents document in group | previous ~location |
author | Link to author's home page | author ~location |
author | Using the same name as in the previous example (author), if you use text instead of the '~' notation, you can name the author | author [author's name] |
date | Date of authoring | date [yyyy/mm/dd] |
Including metadata in each of your documents is easy, you just write them in the head part of your source code, and there are some big advantages for doing so:
When you gloss a source file into XHTML or HTML, the glosser uses a file called html.xsl. This file is called a stylesheet and one style in particular that it adds is a navigation bar to your documents, and it takes the information for your navigation bar from the details specified using meta.modes. For example, if you specify the address for your contents page, index, first, next, previous pages, and homepage of the author, then all these links will appear in the navigation bar of your web page. This helps to add consistency and aid navigation through mulit-page sites.
If you would like to 'turn off' the navigation bar then open the file html.xsl in the gloss installation directory at gloss-1.0\lib. Then comment out the following line: <xsl:call-template name="navigationbar"/>
which appears twice, at around lines 33 and 36. (This file is not a gloss file, and comments are written as <!-- comment contents -->.) The resulting file may be saved where you found it (in which case your changes apply
to all Glossing operations) or in the source directory of the file that you are working on.
As stated above, the navigation bar is added to web pages using meta.modes. However, there are also implications to TeX files when you use meta.modes in your source code and convert the resulting XHTML into TeX. For example, using author proceeded by a name (in text mode) rather than an address will result in the author's name being displayed on the title page. The same applies to the date.
When you convert a project into TeX you probably don't want a different page being used for each page of your site. Instead, what the glosser will do is use the next and previous meta.mode elements to structure your TeX file. It will write each page as a new section and follow straight on from the last one. It knows where the first and last documents are in a 'project' by looking for which page has no 'previous' or 'next' links. I recommend you experiment to try and acheive the output you desire. Please note: For this to work you must first convert all documents in a project to TeX, and then use a LaTeX system to convert one of these to DVI or PDF.
This page is copyright. Web page design and creation by GLOSS.