Quote:
Originally Posted by Oleg Maddox
Video in gif or flash player format probably will be possible in a brif. I don't know which type of HTML we will use in final. You know there is going the new version of HTML in future... Proabbly we will stay with the current for a long time. So if to make everything manually for single missions - then you probably may use all features of current HTML version  . If automatic - then just limited amount of features... |
Hi Oleg!
Wouldn't it be better to have the missions, including briefings etc in xml? If you want to show the briefings as HTML you can just add an xslt file for parsing the briefing part. That way all mission briefings will follow a specified format - but let mission builders add their own xslt:s if they do not want the standard format.
Example xml (start of it - indentation lost pasting it here - full code in a zip at the bottom of post):
<sow-mission>
<briefing>
<meta-info>
<name>JG51-7</name>
<mission-date>1940-09-07 18:35</mission-date>
<version>1.0</version>
<creator>Mazex</creator>
</meta-info>
<images>
<region-images>
<region-image id="1" filename="region1.jpg">The London docks area</region-image>
</region-images>
<mission-overview-images>
<ov-image id="1" filename="overview1.jpg">The intended route</ov-image>
</mission-overview-images>
<recon-images>
<r-image id="1" filename="recon1.jpg" target-id="1">Target 1 - Recon image showing the football factory at XXX</r-image>
<r-image id="2" filename="recon2.jpg" target-id="2">Target 2 - Recon image showing the football yard of the team that beat Maj Molders sons soccer team in 1936 at XXX</r-image>
<r-image id="3" filename="recon3.jpg" target-id="3">Target 3 - Old image showing the ship that we added to this briefing for fun</r-image>
</recon-images>
</images>
...
Using a very simple xslt to parse it giving this look (just an example without the right WWII look etc. - not using all the xml data available like strategic map images etc, I did not have the time...)
Full "code" download here (xml+xslt+css+images)
Please observe that the xml structure is just an example. There should be a lot of other attributes in it!
This is just a suggestion, but I really think that XML should be more "future proof" than HTML. If you later decide that you do not want to use HTML rendering of briefings, just show the info from the xml in the "thick GUI". Want to search all missions on disk that have a certain author? No problem... Someone wants to do a custom mission/briefing editor? Just follow the xml spec and you can make a WYSIG editor for it... There are many advantages in my opinon vs HTML.
What do you think?
EDIT: For interested people not familiar with xml/xsl - just unzip the file above to a local directory and double click the file "briefing_mis123_camp4.xml" to do a local inline xml/xslt transform in you browser (you will hopefully see the page above). The tag <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="jg51_campaign.xsl"?> really shouldn't be there but it's simple for easy local testing. The data is in the .xml file and the html formatting is done in the .xsl file... If you open the file "briefing_mis123_camp4.xml" in a text editor (right click -> open with notepad) you will see that it actually contains xml data and not HTML. It's the row <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="jg51_campaign.xsl"?> at the top that does the magic. It tells your browser to create HTML output bu using the specified .xsl file as a template for interpreting the xml data (for output). Maybe not the best explanation in the world
/Mazex