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

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Finally back from ETS/SBL and staying in the States for a while.  Hope 
to devote quality/quantity time to SWORD stuff again starting in the 
very near future.

a few comments on this thread:

Frontends are welcome to show context however they want.  The engine 
doesn't favour chapter context-- as Ian has already mentioned.

All things considered, I like chapter context.  I know the arguments... 
they aren't very good linguistic context containers.  Of course, I agree.

But practically speaking, as others have mentioned, consistent context 
for a verse that is easily understood by users is valuable.  They should 
know the breaks are false, and if not, they should learn cuz we're not 
going to change the world for them.

I like the idea of scrolling past (or before) a chapter break in a 
display window.

Anyway, my opinions aside.  If there is a simple mechanism we can 
implement in the engine to facilitate frontend developers who wish to 
support other boundaries, then we should accommodate.

I think something similar to:

module.setKey("jn.3.16");
module.setKey(module.getContextBegin());
SWKey contextEnd = module.getContextEnd();
do {
  cout << module.RenderText();
  module++;
} while (module.getKey() != contextEnd && !module.Error());


So, in conclusion, we would be proposing the addition of 
getContextBegin() and getContextEnd() on SWModule, which would return 
SWKey references in the module to where the author chose to break 
context (paragraphs, etc.).

Comments?

	-Troy.





Greg Hellings wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 5:16 PM, Ben Morgan <benpmorgan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 9:55 AM, DM Smith <dmsmith555 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> I agree with some of the earlier posts that we need to formalize the
>>> notion of sections and allow people to show a section at a time. This
>>> can be done by analyzing the positions of the headers and assume that
>>> they mark the start of sections.
>> While I don't see a problem with formalizing the notion of sections (and it
>> would be interesting metadata) I would not use this as a single block of
>> text to display. Possibly something laid out like in, for example, Google
>> Reader - having sections in pages, and allowing scrolling up and down to
>> other pages - would be good.
> 
> While I think that this would be good to have, I think that it ought
> to be left to the module creator.  If I understood DM properly, it
> would use the pre-verse/inter-verse headers.  In lieu of that, it
> could use paragraph breaks (stanza breaks for poetry) or some other
> mechanism.  In my opinion the most important thing is that the library
> and front ends are not the place where these are impressed upon the
> text, but rather that the creators of the content be able to specify
> it how they wish.
> 
> --Greg
> 
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