Checkpoint: EuroCode, Part Two

**Whew!** We are busy, busy, busy at #rdcHQ with several of our current projects reaching important milestones in the month of March. We just delivered 602 new equations and diagrams for the EuroCode document set, which brings our overall total for graphics to 1757 in 29 complete documents. There is a lot more in process, and the totals will climb substantially as we begin the second half of the EuroCode collection. Our goal is to have the full set of 58 documents as close to completion as possible by the end of the month. Kudos to the Codes of the World Project Team!

“Sustainable World” WWW Premiere

We’re almost ready to release “The Beginning of the Sustainable World” on the World Wide Web, and we will be inviting beta testers to screen the film as we release it in three parts — Environment, Society, and Economy — as it was presented at the event on December 12, 2012 at the Savoy Theatre in Port Orford, Oregon. Our video editor confirms that the first part of the film will definitely be ready for private screening this week which is very exciting! … Stay tuned!

Behind-the-scenes at “The Beginning of the Sustainable World” with editor Nate Malamud

Greeting from #rdcHQ! In our Codes of the World Track we are experimenting with CSS styles to replicate the rules for citation used in legal materials such as court cases and journal articles as specified in The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation. The Bluebook is required by courts and law schools in the United States, and is considered an “edict of government,” a mandatory set of rules required to be followed by organizations such as the U.S. District Courts. It is an interesting exercise to code the diagrams so they render the same in every browser. In order to understand how this is achieved requires a closer look at the code.

Below shows one case citation. The citation below depicts a wealth of information such as parties, the deciding court, the Federal Reporter volume number, the pages referred to, date of decision, as well as parenthetical remarks about the decision. Each fragment of the citation is annotated, and since these notes are HTML and CSS-based they can be easily linked to additional materials for context.

Under The Hood: HTML + CSS

Creating detailed notes such as this requires relative positioning of elements within a container <div> and finessing the “display” attribute on the <spans> enclosing the annotations. The combination of these two attributes ensure that the annotations align properly with the corresponding sentence fragments. The code can be viewed and edited at CodePen to get an idea how all of this interrelates.

Note that in order to get the annotations in the top row to align, they must be placed in the order they appear before the corresponding sentence fragment(s). The stem of the note can then be positioned precisely using the “background-position” attribute. The annotations in the bottom row must be placed in context in order to render properly cross-browser. Although it is possible to nest each annotation within a containing span in order for it to remain connected to its corresponding sentence fragment, this author could only get this to work as designed* in Firefox 18.0.2/Mac. We hope that as CSS(n) advances, simple inline annotations (without the aid of JavaScript and fancy frameworks) will be possible.

Footnote: SCSS / SASS / Canvas ++

As the astute coder can see, we were unable to solve this puzzle without the fancy CSS-positioning footwork mentioned above and the use of graphics, most notably the short hash tag that forms the enclosing brackets on the annotations. This was due to the fact that it is not possible to define the length of a border along any side of a <span> or <div> – the border must be the full length of the <span> or have no border at all. This is the kind of control designers need in a markup language.

Fortunately, frameworks like Compass are making control like this possible. Here is a similar diagram of a hyperlink coded within the Compass framework environment at Codepen (although it is much less dense in terms of information than the citation).

The code is elegant and delightfully concise … however, the caveat here is that the framework must be installed on the server that the document resides on (or on the local computer that the document is downloaded to) or the code will not render at all. This is definitely outside of the scope of the Codes of the World criteria that our final art is open and accessible. Hopefully a framework such as this will become part of the overall W3C spec to make the web more typographically beautiful for all!

We’re solving tomorrow’s problems today at #rdcHQ!

Greeting from #rdcHQ! Last week in our “deBUG Days” Track, we worked on re-linking images in Scribus layout pages within Dropbox. Dropbox is an excellent utility for file sharing, and the Dropbox desktop application can be used to create collaborative work environments. The desktop application is ideal for our work on “Life on a Redwood Post” as it creates an exact duplicate of the Dropbox file tree on anyone’s computer with access to the shared folder (You can read more about why this is so great on the Dropbox website). This means that imported images will have an identical path structure when shared between two computers so they will remain linked to the Scribus document.

Unfortunately, Several of the pages of our Bug Book were created before we learned this, so the images had to be relinked in Scribus to the content in the Dropbox environment. This is a common occurrence when collaborating with others on projects — and fortunately it is very easy to relink an image in Scribus. Simply double-click on the missing image, and a search function helps you relocate and relink your missing images.

We’ll be gaining momentum in this track over the coming months leading up to our summer program — Stay Tuned!

Checkpoint: Improving the Art of Eurocode.en

This week at #rdcHQ - we improved the art in 21 documents for EuroCode.en in our Codes of the World 2013 Track. This update to our codebase builds upon our first checkpoint where nearly 1000 graphics were added to the repository at the end of 2012. As of February 2, we now have 1957 total SVGs completed (MathML and diagrams combined) and more in the queue this month. Our goal is to have substantially all of EuroCode.en completed by Spring and we are well on our way.

Next Up: RDC Home Movies!

This month in our #deBUG Open Lab, we’ll be spending time in the editing room putting the finishing touches on The Beginning of the Sustainable World for our web release. There is a lot of work to do to incorporate the feedback we have received, get the proper permissions, and remix the movie to include video taken at the event.

Go, #rdcHQ, Go!