Project Update, Week of Nov. 2

[CarolineMcDonough]

Project Update

During this meeting, we discussed the design elements of our web presence, learned about the purpose (and nearness) of a Markup Freeze, addressed edge-case concerns about individual markup elements, and established a document-trading method by which we could check each other's work.

Web Presence

@Sean-Shmulevich brought an excellent starting webpage design to the meeting, and we discussed potential changes and issues pertaining both to the visual design of the piece and the structure of the xhtml that was used to generate it. Looking forward, we intend to improve the page by:

• [ ] Moving style elements out of the HTML and into their own CSS document
• [x] Adding alt text to our images
• [ ] Creating and linking additional pages through the menu
• [ ] Using flexbox and/or other tools to tweak visual style
• [ ] Replace filler text with appropriate content
• [ ] Check copyright on images
• [ ] Considering how we might process our data using XSLT and future tools for our pages

We don't necessarily intend to complete everything on this list for next meeting, but these are benchmarks relevant to our final page.

Markup Freeze

We discussed the impending markup freeze, which will produce stability in the documents so that we can safely begin constructing XSLT to aggregate and manipulate the results, and decided that while we were not ready for it yet, it made sense to have it happen soon. We decided to defer the question to next week's meeting, wherein we will discuss the results of our peer review and set a date for the freeze according to what (if any) markup work remains to be done.

Edge Cases

Next, we addressed the subjective nature of one of our elements, <action>. and what should be done about specific special cases that had emerged during markup. Below is a table detailing what we decided:

Case Description	Is it an <action>?
Verbs that describe speech	no
Verbs like "thought" or "considered"	yes
Actions described in lies, where the action never occurred	no
Compounded actions like "He pushed and pulled and butted"	yes

Beyond these, we also agreed to add a @name attribute to our schema for actions, so that specific actions could be attributed to their doers, and said that actions taken by one or more people ought to contain both of them in the name attribute (which can then be checked on by a contains() XPath function for processing. This also meant that we could safely mark up actions by Holmes and Watson, which can then be processed differently than side-character actions.

In order to provide time for these changes to the markup methodology, we decided to delay the exchange of documents for peer review until midnight of the next day.

Peer Review Trades

At the end of the meeting, we used a twelve-sided die to randomize the peer-review process (thank you, @cdornn , for providing the die that matched the exact number of stories we were processing). We each rolled the die as many times as it took to get three unique numbers that were not any of the numbers of the stories with which we'd started. Those results were:

Name	Original Files	Files for Peer Review
Sean	1, 6, 9	2, 3, 5
Caroline	2, 7, 8	10, 11, 12
Alyssa	10, 11, 12	1, 4, 8
Rory	3, 4, 5	6, 7, 9

We intend to finish peer reviewing these pieces by reading through and checking for markup mistakes by the start of the next meeting, on the 9th.

[EmmaSchwarz]

Thanks for this excellent project update, Caroline! We really appreciate how clearly you have formatted this update using markdown; it looks great. It's nice to see that you have implemented peer review, as well as that you all are thinking about edge cases while you go over one another's work. Looking forward to seeing the results of your markdown once it's been frozen. Congratulations on getting your site up on the server!