[sword-devel] Interlinear text in HTML?

[Karl Kleinpaste]

peter <refdoc at gmx.net> writes:
> I think all the discussions about limitation referred to obsolete browsers.
> On my Firefox 2.0 the interlinear texts displayed beautifully even when
>    I messed about with the window size.
> So e.g Gnomesword, based on Firefox should do ok.

For the record, GnomeSword can be configured either with FF's MozEmbed
_or_ in its less featureful incarnation with gtkhtml3.  Believe me,
gtkhtml3 is not a bastion of cutting edge display capability.

It continues to be an absolute necessity for us to work with gtkhtml3
because too many platforms don't yet have sufficiently recent MozEmbed
support.  Notably, Cygwin hasn't got it at all; I know of no reason ever
to expect it there, and (based on what I see in my ftp logs) GnomeSword
availability under Cygwin is getting more and more popular and
well-known.  FC5 is also still a reasonably current platform, and its
MozEmbed support is positively braindead -- to get any MozEmbed to work
in FC5 at all, I had to shoe-horn FF2.0 support into my FC5...and
managed to break the gettext translation system as a side effect -- so
GnomeSword is built with gtkhtml3 on FC5, too.

MozEmbed is normal in FC6, F7, and Ubuntu-FF, of course.

In a gtkhtml3 build of GnomeSword, nothing that is CSS-dependent is
available.  That means
- no blocked Strong's and morph
- no superscript footnote and xref markers (no <sup></sup> support)
- no double-space text
- no underline-less links.

The GnomeSword manual in its most recent edit contains a discussion of
such user-visible differences in section 3.9, "Version Differences in
GnomeSword's Display," including a side-by-side screenshot to make clear
what's going on in each.  Obviously, MozEmbed is to be preferred for
general capability as well as interface prettiness, but we can't count
on having it.

--karl