[sword-devel] Sword release roadmap suggestions

[Chris Little]

BTW, my previous message wasn't any kind of papal edict.  Only Troy can
issue those. :)  It was just suggestions that everyone is free to
disagree with, preferrably before we implement too much.

And just because I say that I think we should do some things doesn't
mean I don't think we should do more.  I probably just didn't think of
other things, so please add more stuff to our task list by suggesting it
here.

> > The other major aspect of 1.5.4 will be moving much of the 
> > functionality that gets repeated in all front-ends back 
> into the API.  
> > Rather than creating their own encoding & markup filters (GBFHTML, 
> > Latin1UTF8, UnicodeRTF, etc.), front end authors will simply tell 
> > SWMgr which encoding & markup they desire and it will handle any 
> > necessary conversion for them.  This not only simplifies front end 
> > creation, it allows addition of new formats to the library without 
> > requiring any more than a recompile.
> 
> A very good idea! But the markup part should be flexible 
> enough to support 
> frontend specific handling of HREFs (references, footnotes 
> etc) as well as 
> other things like color etc. We should discuss this. Maybe 
> the markup part is 
> too complex to do in sword?

Yes, we should discuss this.  I believe we can probably come up with a
fairly flexible solution, but if it's not flexible enough, you could
always subclass from SWMgr yourself.

Do you think perhaps we should have a SWEncodingMgr that handles
character encodings and inherits from SWMgr directly, and then have a
SWMarkupMgr that handles markups and inherits from SWEncodingMgr?  That
way you could subclass from SWEncodingMgr if you have special markup
needs.  But if you just want a quick and simple front end you could use
SWMarkupMgr, tell it your desired encoding & markup, and have it do all
the work.

In any case, I don't plan to break the current interfaces.

--Chris