[sword-devel] Sword support of indents and line breaks

[Greg Hellings]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 3:14 PM, Matěj Cepl <mcepl at redhat.com> wrote:

> On 12/04/13 08:04, John Austin wrote:
>
>> Sword should support basic indents and line breaks. Content providers
>> should be able to control the formatting of their texts and should not
>> be required to assign their content to artificial <p>...</p> or other
>> containers to do so. Although these containers might be useful, the text
>> of some translation styles cannot be fit nicely into them. But often
>> content providers do rightly desire their texts to appear with
>> formatting similar to their printed texts, since this is exactly what
>> the translators deemed easiest to read and understand.
>>
>
> If I may give my 0.02 CZK, I would think that the answer is simple: No.
> This goes against the fundamental rule of XML, which is the separation of
> the content (and structure) from presentation.
>
> All whitespace in XML is collapsible and irrelevant for anything more than
> separating words from each other. If you want your text to look different,
> than please no <font> elements, no <milestone type="x-p-indent"/>, or other
> abomination like that. We were there (e.g., see whole discussion about
> <font> element in HTML 3.2) and it was not nice. Elements in XML document
> are just abstract entities without ANY notion of how they are supposed to
> be rendered in the end.
>
> The only thing you should do is to fix your stylesheet or program
> rendering the XML document into whatever output you expect.
>

This is a (debate-ably) good theory.

Sword applications don't allow a module creator to specify a stylesheet,
and those which allow users to specify stylesheets are a world of hurt
because the older code in the Sword filters is not very stylesheet
friendly. Ergo markup is the only avenue open to module creators.

--Greg


>
> Best,
>
> Matěj Cepl
>
> --
> http://www.ceplovi.cz/matej/, Jabber: mcepl at ceplovi.cz
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>
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