[sword-devel] proposed patch: adding n=X marker content to footnotes and xrefs

[Karl Kleinpaste]

When I got home late last evening, I found that Troy and Greg had had a
conversation about this in #xiphos.  Troy theorized and Greg confirmed
that Xiphos must be calling RenderText() too often; I hadn't noticed
this -- it happens in a "bridge" routine in Xiphos' backend by which to
call the engine's getEntryAttributes().  Oops, yes, the performance flaw
was there.  The need for RenderText() at that point is because of
processing mouse hover/click on footnotes and xrefs, in turn because the
verse in question might not be the current module key (so it needs to be
brought into context with RenderText()), but it's not appropriate
_always_ to do it.  So I fixed that.

This leaves the proposed patch as a philosophical question instead of a
performance necessity.  Troy mentioned in last night's conversation with
Greg that "it takes away the choice for frontend developers".  Perhaps
true, but on the other hand the lack of n=X content in *n/*x means every
frontend has to go through this effort, if it's wanted.  I note that
PocketSword replaces *n/*x with small caps N/X (neither '*' nor n=X
content, as a screen real estate conservation issue), and I doubt
BibleTime uses it at all, so I'm wondering what choice is being taken
away.

The reason I made Xiphos do this a while back is in line with what DM
said yesterday, that the information is there, so I'd like to think we
should display it, but the frontends don't get to display it without
being required to do this post-processing of the HTML output.

Thoughts/theories/attitudes?