So I’m about to start wrangling my new DSpace/Manakin theme into shape in Internet Explorer, as you might have gathered from yesterday’s howl of anguish, and it occurred to me to wonder how to alter the stylesheet setup in Manakin to take note of more versions of IE. (Out of the box, it understands “IE” and “IE6.” I am wondering about IE5. Anything previous to that can jump off a cliff and die horribly.)
What I found was actually a limited but relatively simple way to add static information into a Manakin theme without mucking around in Java and whatnot. Note well, it’s a big fat ugly nasty kludge—but it’ll work, and future versions are highly unlikely to break it.
Open up a sitemap.xmap file. Look for the “Step 2″ comment, which introduces some map:transforms based on browser type. That’s your loophole, right there; the information there is going straight into the DRI, in /document/meta/pageMeta/metadata elements. (I’ve left out the namespaces, but you can’t in your XSLT. All the above are in the DRI namespace.)
So let’s take a closer look. The metadata elements in the DRI are structured more or less like good old familiar Dublin Core. There’s an element attribute and a qualifier attribute, and the value is there as the element’s content, so:
<metadata element="stylesheet" qualifier="screen">style.css</metadata>
How does the sitemap.xmap file make that happen in the DRI? Thusly:
<map:parameter name="stylesheet.screen" value="style.css"/>
See? Simple. But as I said, limited—this isn’t where you’re going to be able to put your entire static Help pages or FAQ. But you could, for example, introduce a new navigation bar or the like without having to hack the living hell out of Navigation.java in the ArtifactBrowser Aspect (which is frankly what I did, though it’s a lousy idea because that Aspect governs the entire system, not just one theme, so I’ll probably be replacing that hack with something based on this).
Now, if you’ve been paying close attention to that sitemap.xmap file, you’ll have noticed that all the code I’ve been referring to is inside some conditional stuff (map:select and map:when). I must say I haven’t tried this yet, but I think the way to just plain old add some stuff is to go outside the map:select element altogether and do something like this:
<map:transform type="IncludePageMeta"> <map:parameter name="newElement.newQualifier" value="newValue"/> </map:transform>
It should Just Work, showing up in your DRI where you can grab it via XSLT for whatever nefarious purpose you have in mind.
Kludge at your own risk, as always… but as kludges go, I think this one’s fairly safe and harmless.
