ETT-1600: retire alicorn by carylwyatt · Pull Request #249 · hathitrust/babel

carylwyatt · 2026-08-26T18:59:36Z

This fix removes alicorn and 2021 from the skin options. In pt, I left crms as an option as a skin class name in the html, but removed the others since there's only firebird now. I looked all over for any evidence that the class skin-default (or skin-alicorn, skin-2021) was tied to anything, but if it's doing anything, I can't find it. I was originally planning on using the skin-default class in a playwright test to check that skin=alicorn param falls back to the firebird theme, but it felt silly to keep a class in the code that we don't actually use for anything. I changed the test to locate hathi-website-header, which doesn't exist in the alicorn theme.

At first I wasn't too happy with this fix because Skin.pm sets the <Skin> tag to whatever is passed in via the skin= query param. But then I realized it's only doing that in dev environments, which I think is the point of the skin param, so that's fine.

I don't know a lot about perl and I have a question about this ASSERT:

babel/mdp-lib/View/Fallback.pm

Line 177 in 276c125

    
           ASSERT(grep(/$skin_name/, keys %g_skin_map), qq{Skin=$skin_name not found in skin map});

This isn't throwing an error I don't think, but is it getting logged somewhere every time there's a request for a skin that isn't on the list?

Removal of alicorn directories and stylesheets

Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of legacy stuff to go through in here.

I tested ls, mb, pt, and wayf on dev-3 and everything seems fine. Playwright tests are passing for pt.

I left some comments in the diff but this was mainly just deleting anything in /alicorn directories and cleaning up files that used the stylesheets or other alicorn-related functions.

… still called from search.choke

carylwyatt · 2026-08-27T19:23:34Z

    my $config = $C->get_object('MdpConfig');
    my $records_per_page = $config->get('default_records_per_page');

-    if ( $total_records > $records_per_page && $cgi->param('skin') ne 'alicorn' ) {


skin will never equal alicorn (or it could, but there won't be a corresponding theme to load), so I removed this bit from the conditional

carylwyatt · 2026-08-27T19:24:00Z

    return $s;
 }

-sub handle_CACHE_TIMESTAMP_PI


This was only ever used with alicorn assets.

carylwyatt · 2026-08-27T19:25:02Z

-<head>
-  <title>Unauthorized</title>
-  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/common/alicorn/css/main.201910.css" />
-  <script type="text/javascript" src="/common/alicorn/js/utils.201910.js"></script>


I'm not even sure these reports live in pt anymore, but I removed the stylesheet in here for good measure.

carylwyatt · 2026-08-27T19:27:25Z


-<head>
-  <title>Indexing in Progress | HathiTrust Digital Library</title>
-  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/common/alicorn/css/main.201910.css" />


PT does use this file, which I found out when testing pt-search for Lianet a couple months ago, but it's only ever returned as a response from search.choke and we never see the UI in page turner. There is no modal with this info in it, I only saw the text as a response in the network tab of my browser.

I only removed the stylesheet here, but this could probably use a rework at some point.

The rest of the "changes" here are linting/formatting.

carylwyatt · 2026-08-27T19:31:38Z

I removed a few ancient html pages and unused stylesheets.

carylwyatt · 2026-08-27T19:36:01Z

I removed this one after determining that it isn't called from anywhere anymore. I could see that it used to be called (in ls.choke, for example), but I couldn't find evidence of that for current-day ls.

aelkiss

I had one question about the change in pageturner, but otherwise all looks fine to me.

We should test this carefully via test.babel before deploying (and after making sure any old assets under test.babel are cleaned up).

aelkiss · 2026-08-31T13:33:12Z

@@ -30,12 +30,6 @@
    <xsl:if test="$gIsCRMS = 'true'">
      <xsl:text> crms </xsl:text>
    </xsl:if>
-    <xsl:choose>


Removed because there are no other skins to support currently?

@aelkiss Ah, yes, I explained this in the description area up top before removing a bunch of other stuff, I should've put this in with the other diff comments:

In pt, I left crms as an option as a skin class name in the html, but removed the others since there's only firebird now. I looked all over for any evidence that the class skin-default (or skin-alicorn, skin-2021) was tied to anything, but if it's doing anything, I can't find it.

👍 sorry I missed that!

carylwyatt · 2026-09-01T19:53:09Z

We should test this carefully via test.babel before deploying (and after making sure any old assets under test.babel are cleaned up).

@aelkiss Agreed, and will-do. There are no alicorn assets on test (see ~~https://test.babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=1&skin=alicorn~~ well i just staged this on test, so you can't see that anymore 🙈) , so my plan when this deploys is to move /babel/common aside and double check everything just in case it needs to be put back. (/htapps/test.babel/common has docker config stuff in it, but /htapps/babel/common on macc/ictc is the old common repo with the built assets in /web/alicorn)

Here's what test.babel...&skin=alicorn pt looked like just moments ago, trying to fetch assets from /htapps/test.babel/common that don't exist

carylwyatt added 3 commits August 26, 2026 14:15

remove alicorn, update fallbacks

caff180

remove 'skin' class from pt

276c125

add playwright test

7503012

carylwyatt requested review from aelkiss and removed request for aelkiss August 26, 2026 19:00

carylwyatt added 10 commits August 27, 2026 13:09

remove 2021 and alicorn files from pt

6d9a291

remove alicorn from mdp-web, remove old css and html

a19f3dd

remove unused cache timestamp

b5ea781

remove epub from pt

c8ccc2e

remove alicorn from ls

bbfa04a

remove alicorn from mb

75f639e

delete alicorn wayf

4c2dfc8

remove usability study html page

21dbf9c

remove alicorn stylesheet from 503 page; we dont use this UI but it's…

6487351

… still called from search.choke

remove alicorn stylesheets from reports 401 page

05e31de

carylwyatt commented Aug 27, 2026

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Comment thread mdp-web/bookmarklet.html

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I removed a few ancient html pages and unused stylesheets.

carylwyatt commented Aug 27, 2026

View reviewed changes

carylwyatt requested a review from aelkiss August 27, 2026 19:37

aelkiss reviewed Aug 31, 2026

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carylwyatt merged commit 992e67c into main Sep 1, 2026
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carylwyatt deleted the ETT-1600-retire-alicorn branch September 1, 2026 19:57

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ETT-1600: retire alicorn - #249

ETT-1600: retire alicorn#249
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Removal of alicorn directories and stylesheets

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