[sword-devel] SweFolk issues

[DM Smith]

On Mar 24, 2009, at 7:09 AM, Chris Little wrote:

> Karl Kleinpaste wrote:
>> Chris Little <chrislit at crosswire.org> writes:
>>> Kinda ironic. What happened to release early, release often?
>> Kinda ironic.  What happened to "make our content as high quality  
>> as I
>> can" and "deserves better than a careless attitude" in light of the  
>> fact
>> that your conversion has lost numerous <br /> elements e.g. Ps1:1,2?
>> Source XML v1:
>>  Salig är den som inte följer<br />de ogudaktigas råd
>> OSIS:
>>  Salig är den som inte följer de ogudaktigas råd
>> Source XML v2:
>>  utan har sin glädje<br />i
>> OSIS:
>>  utan har sin glädje i
>
> I can read Swedish--poorly, but well enough to know that the <br/>s  
> have no semantic meaning. Typographic linebreaks within poetic lines  
> are generally quite uncommon and would only serve to reduce the  
> salience of poetic lines.
>
> The source markup had numerous evident errors, particularly in  
> Psalms, so I interpreted these <br/>s as among them. If genuinely  
> desired, it wouldn't be difficult to put them back.

The second example with only a single word after the <br/> suggests  
that they are an artifiact.

If not, and without looking at the source, I'd suggest that they be  
put back in either as <l n="2">...</l> (where n is one greater than  
the line it breaks) or as <lb/>.

I suggest the former if it is within a <l> and <lb/> otherwise. The  
placement after a small number of words seems to imply formatting. If  
they are not meaningful at all, then perhaps replace them with a  
<milestone> element indicating a line break to retain all original  
markup in some form.

Regarding poetry in general, I think lines provide little, if any,  
semantic meaning. (But then again, I failed the poetry part of high  
school English!) It seems that the sole purpose of poetic markup is to  
present poetry. (I'd be curious as to where the line breaks would be  
in a Hebrew scroll.)

DM