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

[Chris Little]

On 4/12/2013 6:58 AM, Greg Hellings wrote:
>
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 6:57 AM, John Austin
> <gpl.programs.info at gmail.com <mailto:gpl.programs.info at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     You didn't address my main point: Content providers should be given
>     a way to have final control over how their formatted texts appear,
>     and one which is simple and reliable. I'll comment below, but a
>     Bible translation is not a web-page or an app which might need a new
>     look someday, or a new skin. CSS and content abstraction etc. are
>     great ideas, but they should not be artificially forced onto Bible
>     publishers. Yes, they should be offered, and even encouraged- fine.
>     But publishers should be able to say: "This is exactly how I want
>     the formatting, everywhere, any time. Period." I don't understand
>     why this expectation is so abhorrent. Offering a handful of content
>     abstractions and extensions, all of whose definitions are arguable
>     (see below) and likely in flux, is neither simple, nor satisfying to
>     content providers who desire control over the presentation of their
>     texts.
>
>
> You'll find that many people in this list are strongly opposed to giving
> content providers any sort of presentational control over their text.
> This is unfortunate, but it is the direction Sword is lead in.

No one in this thread had opposed giving some presentational control to 
encoders. (Matěj has, but he wrote after you.)

I have no problem with providing means for presentational control, but I 
believe it should be done correctly, using appropriate methods. That 
means <p> attributes on the OSIS side and CSS styling on the XHTML side. 
The proposed solution is an abuse of both OSIS and the CDATA stream 
output by the filters. It's incredibly easy to add paragraph indentation 
support the correct way, and no reasonable rationale has been given for 
why it should be done differently.

--Chris