Skip to content
Wendell Piez edited this page Aug 4, 2015 · 2 revisions

HaiKuML XML/XSLT Demonstration

HaiKuML is a small demonstration of the use of XML for literary study, produced for the JADH 2015 conference at Kyoto University (Sep 1-3 2015), in connection with my keynote address, The Craft of XML. See http://conf2015.jadh.org/ for information on the conference.

Using HaiKuML, you may transcribe and annotate Japanese poetry, with an XSLT transformation to provide automatic lookup of kanji in a dictionary. The demonstration uses the CJKV-English dictionary by Charles A Muller, from which extracts are provided to duplicate functionality (for the sample files) of the full version.

Having marked up a poem with HaiKuML tags, the annotated version can be processed with XSLT to produce an HTML file viewable in a browser.

In addition to showing the flexibility and power of XML for this kind of work, the purpose of this demonstration is to test current browser support for displaying Japanese. Early results show that browsers including Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are able to display furigana (ruby markup of Chinese characters showing Japanese pronunciation), while only Chrome is able to show Japanese in top-down, right-left reading order. (IE and Safari have not yet been tested: let me know if you have any success with them.)

To run the demonstration, a copy of oXygenXML Editor may be used, for which a temporary license is available from the author. (Please ask.) Or, those experienced with XSLT can run the transformations using an XSLT engine of their choice. The kanji-lookup stylesheet requires XSLT 2.0, while the display stylesheet needs only XSLT 1.0 (and will function in conformant browsers).

Clone this wiki locally