Documentation

This page contains links to documentation on the various technologies used by the LETC.

Electronic Text

Electronic text, like all computer data, is stored as a series of 0s and 1s. There are various character encodings used to map these binary sequences onto human-readable characters (letters of the alphabet, punctuation marks, etc.). The default character encoding for modern web browsers is ISO-8859-1. Some of the web sites maintained by the LETC use UTF-8 instead (see www.unicode.org for documentation).

Markup

The electronic text delivered by the LETC is marked-up in HTML or XHTML. The Hume texts published at www.davidhume.org are stored as XML files, and transformed into HTML for delivery using XSLT. Specifications for these languages are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium, and a good set of introductory tutorials can be found at www.w3schools.com.

Other technology used

The databases for the FRAME and CHOP projects we are currently supporting use Microsoft SQL Server (see Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Books Online for documentation). The web interfaces to be delivered at the ends of these projects will be designed with PHP (see www.php.net), making use of Microsoft’s PHP add-on sqlsrv for communicating with the databases (see Microsoft’s SQL Server Driver for PHP Documentation).