[sword-devel] Poetry support in Xiphos?

[Peter von Kaehne]

As we are now thoroughly off topic, I guess we can stay here.

On Wed, 2011-12-28 at 23:01 +1100, Ben Morgan wrote:

> Yes, it is editable. But I also think that is off the point.
> Personally, I don't edit it because I don't see much point.

There is no need for you to edit it. It is largely maintained by David
and I (former more than latter). It has been extremely useful in the
past in order to 

a) define a bit more what we considered at some stage as a "fully
featured frontend" - I am sure you remember that discussion, 

b) it has shown that a fair number of frontends implement the same kind
of feature in different ways +/- name it differently. Highlighting this
has lead IIRC to at least some standardisation and some increased
collaboration. 
c) (I admit this unashamedly) it has led to some tickbox development of
small fry stuff which was not there in one frontend or another

and 

d) it has highlighted specific features and led others to emulate. 

I also think at least one or two small things have moved from frontends
into the engine as a result of this.

Given that we have in general very little development activity in
CrossWire right now, it might indeed be currently of little interest,
but I live in hope that CrossWire is not as dead as it seems right now.
 
> Basically, any checklist like this is interesting in one sense, but
> doesn't give a big picture. Some programs can have paid special
> attention to features so that they are useful and discoverable, others
> may just have shoe-horned a feature in and it is hard to use. Last
> time I looked, some of the unique features of BPBible could
> technically be claimed by other programs depending on exactly how I
> phrased it - but only BPBible did the feature in a really useful way
> (I'm just choosing BPBible because it's what I've worked on, though
> for various reasons I haven't touched it for a while - no doubt other
> programs have similar things). 

I think, this is quite unfair an attitude to take - none of the various
frontends have been designed with much usability expert input, so all
reflect essentially what the respective developers thought a useful way
of implementing one or the other feature. I know of no feature in e.g.
BpBible which is _superior_ in its implementation to Xiphos (e.g.) from
a scientific point of view. I do know that there are differences, but
these boil probably all down to taste, history of a feature and fluke.
Do you disagree?


> Also last time I looked the checklist was much too long and didn't
> always concentrate on what I consider the important things.
> 
The checklist was always in the developer wiki and not meant for general
public. We did think though it might one day assist in highlighting
specific "killer features" in our general public pages - and it also
might be used to cut down inane verbiage in our application page, but
showing what all is common between all applications.

> In the open source world (and it's not just open source), sometimes it
> just ends up a battle for how many checkboxes you can claim you
> ticked. I don't think that is useful to the user quite a lot of the
> time - they care about the general experience, and if the program
> doesn't provide a given feature/option/etc., but does provide a good
> experience, they may not even know/care, and that's fine. 
> 
I have no disagreement in principle. I would think e.g. transliteration
is probably less important than av11n, former being important to a few
only, latter being crucial to half the non English speaking world, but
as I said, the page was never designed with tge general public in mind.

Peter