[sword-devel] Scope/NoParagraphs (was: Re: Bible book introductions)

[Chris Little]

On 6/3/2013 5:55 AM, DM Smith wrote:
> I saw that Scope was yanked from the wiki with a comment that it had
> been rejected. I really don't remember it being rejected. I just
> remember that the discussion never went anywhere so it was dropped. I
> documented the desire of that discussion by putting an entry into the
> wiki. Even if engine support is given for determining this by
> examining a module, it will be far slower than having a declaration
> in the conf. On phones (low powered devices), such discovery is much
> too expensive and needs to be cached on a per module basis so that it
> is not recomputed.
>
> I still think that it is very needed. I'm getting tired of how such
> discussions go.

This is the message in which I would say that scope gets rejected:
http://www.crosswire.org/pipermail/sword-devel/2012-February/037148.html

None of Troy's concerns are addressed, and the rest of the thread 
devolves into off-topic irrelevancy. Scope has certainly not risen to 
the level of being a part of our .conf spec.

If you feel that Scope should still be under consideration, I encourage 
you to address Troy's objections.

> I'm not at all clear why NoParagraphs was added as a Feature for the
> frontends to use. I don't remember any discussion of it here. I don't
> see the need for it. A frontend can examine each and every verse to
> see if there is paragraphing or other such structural elements that
> imply paragraphing. I have no intention of using it for the KJV. At
> least not without community discussion and buy-in.
>
> How is NoParagraphs any different than NoIntroductions (or
> Introductions) !!!!!

They're quite different. There are an order of magnitude more verses 
than introductions. Knowing whether to render a particular chapter (or 
other view scope) as VPL or paragraphed would require doing a substring 
search through every single verse of the module in order to maintain 
consistent rendering across chapters. So that would make it about a 3-4 
orders of magnitude more work than checking for introductions at run 
time. (Compare the number of bytes per Bible times the number of 
paragraphing elements to the number of chapters per Bible. That's the 
difference in the order of work.)


Feature=NoParagraphs was discussed in 2009. Literally no one disagreed 
with the proposal to add *something*. David asked about a feature like 
this a few weeks back, prompting me to add the discussed and generally 
approved-of feature to the wiki. I went with NoParagraphs rather than 
Paragraphs because it's clearly the marked case and the fallback 
behavior for existing content will be the current behavior.

Original discussion thread here:
http://www.crosswire.org/pipermail/sword-devel/2009-November/033058.html

It's informational for front end developers, so there are no implied 
conformance requirements. If you want to render the KJV incorrectly by 
default in Bible Desktop, that's your choice.

--Chris