[sword-devel] Chapter-centric browsing (was: iPhone frontend alpha screenshots)

[Jonathan Morgan]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 6:18 PM, Eeli Kaikkonen
<eekaikko at mail.student.oulu.fi> wrote:
> Quoting Jonathan Morgan <jonmmorgan at gmail.com>:
>>
>> I'll add another con - the poor user has no consistent mental model.
>> They can have no way to guess why one time they get 3:1 - 4:2 one
>> time, and 2:5 - 4:27 another time.  This could be especially
>> problematic if their module has a paragraph structure that is
>> different and is broken in some cases.
>
> Not quite so - I meant this for chapter based queries. There's no
> situation where user would get sometimes 3:1-4:2 and sometimes
> 2:5-4:27. If he asks for ch.3 he gets (for example) 3:1-4:2 every
> time. It's up to the frontend to provide it in a way which shows the
> ch.3 clearly. It just has extra context so that when a chapter
> boundary breaks a possible passage the user doesn't have to click back
> and forth when reading that passage. It's not very different from
> showing 3 chapters at the time instead of one (which, in turn, might
> be the easiest solution).

And I was referring to that also.  I would consider it confusing if I
went to chapter 3 and it showed me five verses of context on one side
and 23 on the other, while going to chapter 5 gave me no verses of
context on one side and two on the other.  I could not in general
formulate a reasonable model of what it is doing and why, especially
if it was breaking into the middle of paragraphs in my preferred
version with its context.  It would also affect my ability to go up to
the top of the chapter with Page Up as I described and then look down
if it added an excessive amount of context (though I'm not sure I
would do that with a non-chapter interface).

However, I think fundamentally what context you want depends on what
you are doing.  You might be able to get better breaks than chapters,
but they will still be somewhat arbitrary and artificial, and they are
still not going to provide context for all purposes.  It doesn't mean
"don't do them", it just means "be aware of their limitations".

Jon