[sword-devel] Titles and other Inter-verse material

[Chris Little]

On 07/23/2012 07:35 PM, Kahunapule Michael Johnson wrote:
>
>
> On 07/23/2012 04:06 PM, Chris Little wrote:
>> On 07/23/2012 07:09 AM, David Haslam wrote: ...
>>
>>
>>> He therefore introduced a new OSIS element <milestone
>>> type="x-p-indent" />
>>>
>>> It's used to provide a poetry indentation as an alternative to
>>> using line elements with level attributes. Currently, deeper
>>> indents are created by two or three <milestone type="x-p-indent"
>>> /> elements in series.
>>
>> That sounds incredibly bad. It's up there with milestoned <p/>.
>>
>> Why not just encode &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; * the number of
>> indents? Or use the UTF-8 equivalent, which is only 10-bytes long.
>> They both require no processing by rendering filters and are
>> meaningless as standard markup like the milestone tag above.
>
> The reason that Xulsword works well with poetry is that its different
> markup is matched with its different display code making a better
> over-all system with respect to poetry display.

...which could have also been achieved by rendering the standard markup 
as expected, rather than by adding handling of non-standard markup.

> If you think that milestoned paragraph types, poetic or otherwise,
> are a bad idea, then the best argument you can make is by making
> non-milestoned paragraphs, poetry, and prose work well end-to-end. In
> the mean time, somebody just proved that milestoned poetic lines can
> work well.

<p/> is bad because it uses a container element to represent a 
non-container, and it abuses the semantics of the element for purely 
typographic purposes.

<milestone type="x-p-indent" /> is bad because it employs a private-use 
extension to imply the semantics of a container element, again for 
purely typographic purposes.

> In the end, I think that it is the whole system that matters, not
> just the source markup, module creation, module format, engine, and
> front ends individually, but how they work together as a unit to
> display Scriptures in many languages and with the features and
> typographic formatting richness that people have come to expect from
> their Bibles.

Yes... it's the whole system that matters, and having one front end 
render non-standard markup in a non-standard way doesn't really aid the 
situation, considering that the texts that come from CrossWire are all 
going to conform to the standard. Following a standard is precisely how 
to make all the individual parts work together in predictable ways.

It also hasn't been identified why
<l level="2">....</l>
is more difficult to translate into an indentation than
<milestone type="x-p-indent" />,
so I necessarily see this as a solution in search of a problem.

--Chris