This draft site currently provides a framework for navigating amongst various displays. The XML Code contains a copy of the marked up text, currently just the first ten lines of The Battle of Brunanburh. At this point, the tagging is partial, and mostly confined to layout (line and word breaks). A few punctuation marks and special characters have been added to test tagging techniques.

Clicking on Edited Text reveals the tagged XML code transformed using an XSL stylesheet. This stylesheet selects the <item> node from each word entry in the <line> node of the XML code and displays it, adding any punctuation marks in the code. At the end of each <line> node it adds a line break. The stylesheet also surrounds each word with HTML links. These can be used to reveal specific information on each word, but currently there is no information available from the links (clicking will generate a blank page).

• 20 September, 2007. I am currently attending a Text Encoding Seminar at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It is proving very useful, and I hope to make some advances in the xml coding in the near future.
• 15 September, 2007. I have now secured digitized copies of the manuscript pages for each of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle poems. The images are scanned from Fred C. Robinson and E. G. Stanley, eds, Old English Verse Texts from Many Sources: A Comprehensive Collection, Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile 23 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1991) and are not necessarily of the best quality, but better photos will be secured for the final edition. The images cannot be displayed on this site for copyright (not to mention storage capacity) reasons, but they wlll be invaluable in the production of the electronic edition.
• 30 May, 2006. It is possible to represent most special characters by defining their entities in the XSL stylesheet based on Unicode standard encoding references (e.g. &#275; for ē , e with a macron). However, it will probably be necessary in the end to shift to a special font (e.g. Junicode). For instance, most Unicode fonts shipped with recent versions of Windows are based on the 2.0 standard, whereas y with a macron was added in the 3.0 standard. It therefore may not show up (here is an example using Arial: ȳ). The problem with Junicode (other than the necessity for the user to download the font) is that it may not be the best for on-screen display.
• 8 June, 2006. A new Glossary page has been added to demonstrate the development of an XSL stylesheet to transform the code into a glossary format. This has necessitated a number of changes to the XML source code, and, in order to avoid re-tagging the entire XML Code for the poem, the first four lines have been taken as a working sample. The code for this working sample can be seen at fragment.html. Although the glossary stylesheet works, a number of observations may be noted for further development.
  1. Currently the items in each entry are separated by spaces and dots; this does not represent the final format, which can be changed easily (likewise the boldface and italics).
  2. As can be seen from the entry for and, the form for each line is given, even if it is the same as earlier forms (i.e. the word and occurs with that spelling in lines 1 and 4). There needs to be some way to combine them into a single entry (e.g. and 2, 4). This can probably be done with some keys and Boolean logic.
  3. Relevant grammatical features for structure-class words need to be added to the markup.
  4. As can be seen from the entry for eorl, grammatical forms are given in order of occurrence, not in order of grammatical form. A sort function must be introduced.
  5. As can be seen from the entry for geslean, a person category needs to be introduced to the markup.
• 8 June, 2006. Web pages for the XML Code and working fragment have been created, but it might also be worth creating equivalent pages which show the two stylesheets. Currently the code for the stylesheets can be observed in Microsoft Internet Explorer by opening the XSL Stylesheet for the Edited Text or the XSL Stylesheet for the Glossary.