[sword-devel] Module Display Names

[Greg Hellings]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 4:38 PM, Karl Kleinpaste <karl at kleinpaste.org> wrote:
> Actually, there's a module with an even longer Description.  "Practice" has:
>
> The Practice of the Presence of God: The Best Rule of Holy Life by Brother Lawrence (Nicholas Herman, 1605-1691)
>
> Gosh, that's annoyingly long.

Maybe, but hardly out of the ordinary for older titles.

>
> Greg Hellings <greg.hellings at gmail.com> writes:
>> One of my modules is [CONNOT] which is a decent abbreviation
>> and it fits in the limits of SWORD.  Currently I have the About field
>> set to"Consultant Notes" and the About field set to "<p>Consultant
>> Notes for Translators.</p>".
>
> About and About?  I think you meant Description and About.

Correct!

>
> Contents of About aren't supposed to contain HTML, notwithstanding that
> it happens to work.  That content is formally RTF.  You'll see a lot of
> \par and so forth in *.conf About fields.

Well, when your target is limited to only two front-ends, you can cut
corners.  Also, when the modules are started by someone with a strict
repulsion for RTF, this is what you get.  I don't think we actually
have any content in our About fields that needs markup of any kind, so
I'll probably just remove it before we go to production.

>
>> Perhaps you can shed some light on why you use the
>> value of the name instead of the Description in your widget?
>
> Because that's the way it's been since The Dawn Of Net.Time, which was
> way back when Terry first did it. :-D
>
> Seriously, no one's ever asked about it before.
>
> It could certainly be reasonable to update module selection widgets to
> use Description instead of the [BracketedName]; but I wonder about
> possible confusion because [BracketedName] is guaranteed to be unique
> but Description is not, and considering the selection of Description
> used at e.g. bible.org...
>
>   Free version of NET Bible Footnotes with limited notes
>   Free version of New English Translation with limited notes
>   NET Bible Footnotes presented in the form of a commentary.
>   New English Translation text only with footnote markers
>   New English Translation with over 60,000 translator, study and text critical notes
>
> ...with so much similarity from one to another, I worry that the user
> won't get the connection, and especially that he won't grasp the
> difference when tabs have [BracketedNames] (for minimal length purposes)
> that would then be seen pretty much nowhere else.  Also, at the moment,
> I've got DM's (old) beta "NASB" and Troy's (new) beta "NASBnew"...
>
>   New American Standard Bible
>   New American Standard Bible (NEW)
>
> ...whose minor change is almost unnoticeable and could lose the "(NEW)"
> the next time Troy puts out an update.
>
> I'm open to opinion about the problem, of course.

I crafted my response to Ben's email a few minutes ago with these
preceding few paragraphs in mind working with the not-unique issue and
my own preference for how I would have done it back in the Land Before
Time.

--Greg