[sword-devel] Sidebars

[Peter von Kaehne]

Dear All, 

A study bible I am currently working on, written in USFM has a feature
not currently covered by our software: "sidebars". 

These are small mini documents, in-depth explanations of a feature
covered by the text. They have titles, they have paragraphs, they have
inline crossreferences, they might contain images, they could in theory
have footnotes etc. 

Right now they are simply as a div type=x-sidebar chucked into the
text. 

Any suggestion as to how we could represent them graphically? 

Options coming to my mind are 

- extended footnotes (and then work on frontends to support graphically
more challenging footnotes). This will require work in engine and
frontends

- inline. This should probably happen just now without any extra work

- floating text popups via CSS +/- some javascript which come up on
mouse hover. This will require some work in engine and possibly
frontends too and will only be available in XHTML based frontends.

I am happy to have a go at the work within the engine and think options
(2) and (3) at least should largely be within my ability to fix. 

Any alternative suggestions or thoughts? Any strong views wrt
preference of these? 

Peter