[sword-devel] Crossreferences

[Karl Kleinpaste]

Mike Hart <just_mike_y at yahoo.com> writes:
> I'd really like this list of references as a commentary that can be
> watched next to the text, However, adding material into texts that are
> not present in the dead tree version is scary and deceptive to me.

Although I can appreciate a desire for, shall we say, textual purity in
what we display, the very existence of our software is a statement of a
desire for more display facility than was ever provided in a print
Bible.  When Xiphos offers automatically-denoted and -highlighted user
annotations, is that not also "adding material into texts"?  But such
material is not part of the text itself, rather it is part of the user's
environment into which we have let him add personalized features.

As I mentioned when this was first brought up, I think it would be
interesting to use such a reference module as a follow-along source of
additional xrefs in Xiphos.  I would not let the display be such that
the follow-along content would be confused with the native content, any
more than Xiphos' user annotations appear as footnotes, even though they
have very much a footnote nature.  User annotations appear as "*u" at
the beginning of the verse, while native footnotes appear as "*nDD".  In
a similar vein, if I was to implement such a follow-along xref concept,
I would denote it separately in another manner -- perhaps, in line with
long-established habit, I would pick another visual such as "*y" at
verse beginning to distinguish it as an xref that is different from
regular "*xDD" xrefs.  Implementing this as an on-the-fly source of
additional data will be very easy.

I do think such a follow-along module, containing no content other than
footnotes and xrefs, should be constructed as a commentary module, thus
making it useful in typical commentary fashion (like TSK) but with some
sort of .conf indicator to distinguish it for its potential unique use.
We have other Feature and Category qualifiers, and I think something
like Feature=Follow would be a suitable and valuable indicator.