Browse interface needed in addition to search

[martindholmes]

It would be useful to have a drill-down browsing interface so you could choose e.g.

year -> county -> city -> record list
county -> city -> year -> record list
trade -> county -> city -> year -> record list

etc. All of this can of course be done via the search, but many users will find a browse interface more appealing, and also it will provide a mechanism by which web crawlers and archivers can find their way to all the record pages, meaning that the whole site could be archived by a crawler minded to do it. We should also provide a standard sitemap.xml file for this purpose, of course.

[martindholmes]

Working on this in branch issue-5-browse.

[martindholmes]

The year range is 1020 to 2004 at the moment, which will add a lot of pages when we add browsing. I think the logical starting point will be county -> city -> year -> records, and in fact these pages could be simply a browsing mechanism to a pre-configured search, but if we do that, we lose any way of getting to the records without JavaScript.

[martindholmes]

This is blocked by some dependency issues arising from the organization of the XSLT. I may need to split the functions module in two or move a required function into the TEI generation code to make further progress. I need to add @xml:ids to the orgography XML files and right now there's a problem.

[martindholmes]

Got past that problem, and as of today we have a county listing page, with each county linking to its own page, which lists its cities/towns. Those are links to what I hope will be individual city pages, which in turn will perhaps link to individual years. What happens from there is not clear yet -- maybe a link out to a pre-configured search?