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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Thanks for the email Karl. Yes, when I
read Laurie's concise and informative report of how we do on
different features and output formats, I was grateful in my heart
and planned to use her report for improving the XHTML filters. I
agree, these are bugs and we need to fix them. I started the
XHTML filters with 2 hopes: that those who use their own filter
sets would consider collaborating together on this filter set
provided with the engine, and that those who use the XHTML filters
would improve them. We all have 5 projects we're working on these
days and as usual, what is urgent for our own work, or what is
easy and fun, is usually highest priority for each of us. I'm
happy to see a commit to improve the XHTML filters.<br>
<br>
Regarding your TTS impl, have you considered calling
module.stripText(). This should give a reasonable plain-text
representation of a module entry. <br>
<br>
On 10/08/2014 11:33 AM, Karl Kleinpaste wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote cite="mid:54358361.7060103@kleinpaste.org" type="cite">
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Longish ramble.<br>
<br>
I'm still finding our lack of attention or interest regarding
consistent output somewhat disappointing. David wrote a lot a
couple weeks back about this, but some of it just plain bugs me,
and no one else followed up at all. Some of the bugs-me is
non-specific, some is very specific.<br>
<br>
On 09/23/2014 02:32 PM, David "Judah's Shadow" Blue wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:700a5d83-194d-4dbc-a0aa-7a5e6e59221f@email.android.com"
type="cite">Now all this might sound pedantic and that
front-ends should just render what the engine sends, but imagine
a frontend that sends the text through a TTS engine for visually
impaired persons. This frontend would have no use for HTML
formatting, but it would care what the underlying markup that
this HTML represents is.</blockquote>
I have 2 reactions to this observation.<br>
<br>
1. I don't know if any other frontends are capable of it, but
Xiphos has been TTS-friendly for ~8 years. (Cf. Read Aloud in the
View menu for walking straight through a Bible, or using
mouse-swept regions + context menu invocation.) And indeed, as
noted, I don't care what the markup looks like, indeed I ship the
text through a tag stripper before it goes out to Festival. There
is no consideration at all to what was there, it is all blindly
removed and simply shipped for speaking. Yes, one could
hypothetically say that a change of voice could be used in the TTS
case, but -- this is important -- <u>nobody cares</u>.<br>
<br>
You see, for as long as I've been around, there has always been a
huge amount of talk within Sword about The Wonderful Things That
Could Be Done. But the real world's bottom line is that the
five-9s proportion of our actual user base has a straightforward
goal: Good, productive Bible study using quality tools. Precious
few are deaf or blind, and almost none are interested in full-tilt
syntactic analysis tools. So all the "see, the markup could let
Joe Handicap have the text delivered in his Special Way" really
doesn't mean squat in the real world.<br>
<br>
2. I'm not arguing against OSIS. Not all, in fact. Nor against
handicap support. But what I'll say about this sort of
over-attention to the hyperactive extremes of what could be done
routinely leads us to miss, or deliberately avoid, the underlying
problem.<br>
<br>
That problem, as addressed by Laurie Fooks' experimentation, is
that collectively we do a kind of poor job of consistent rendering
of what's under there. For the five-9s crowd, what they want is
good, consistent display of textual content. For the moment,
ignore the potential blind or deaf user of our apps. The problem
is that we, the frontend developers, have a pronounced tendency to
produce <i>different things</i> for the <i>same text</i>, as
displayed in the usual panes of our apps. Is that because of the
frontend itself, or because of what the frontend gets from the
engine?<br>
<br>
That is where Laurie's experimentation reached, and where we
collectively fall over the cliff. We are accelerating at 32f/s^2
toward going <b><i>splat</i></b> on the canyon floor below while
blandly discussing how nifty a more extensive TTS would be.<br>
<br>
As far as the "not a Bible-reading program at all" crowd...I
absolutely do not care. The syntactic analyzer portion of our
userbase is past the nine-9s crowd.<br>
<br>
It occurs to me that my "N-9s" nomenclature may be unclear or
unknown. Five-9s is 99.999%. Nine-9s is 99.9999999%. I use
these in mild hyperbole. When I say that the five-9s crowd wants
just to see good Bible textual display and whatever features can
readily go with that, I mean that out of a hundred thousand users,
just one of them is outside that usual space. Now, I said it's
hyperbole, and someone will tell me that they have a whole
community of users for whom TTS is crucial...totalling all of 10
people, or even 100 people. Well, fine, you've moved the issue
from five-9s to four-9s, 99.99%, and ... whoopie. You have done
nothing to make me feel better.<br>
<br>
Besides, as noted, Xiphos has TTS, it's proven to be quite a bit
more welcome than I ever intended it to be -- it was my first
significant hack on then-GnomeSword, <i>which </i><i>I did </i><i>as
an exercise </i>for code familiarity's sake -- and to my
knowledge there exists not one Xiphos user who is a Xiphos user <i>because
of </i>TTS. They are Xiphos users because there are other
aspects they like, having to do with workflow or presentation or
search capability or whatever else, and prefer these aspects over
other Sword apps, and TTS is a pleasantly useful side capability
they are happy to put to use.<br>
<br>
...<br>
<br>
The problem is that, for given OSIS constructs, the user -- and,
let us not be remiss, the publisher -- cannot be assured that what
arrives at the user's eyeballs is even readable, much less
provided as intended.<br>
<br>
Why is this? Xiphos uses straight engine output from XHTML
filters. BibleTime uses the engine but with its own filters.
JSword apps have their own entire separate engine, and JSword is
now driving almost half of all Sword apps out there. Within apps
using the C++ engine, BibleCS uses a different set of filters
(RTF) which evidently do not produce the same visual result as the
XHTML filters. Consistency is lacking because the end result of
all these widely differing filtrations cannot be counted upon. Is
BibleCS' visual display different because of inherent limitations
or differences from Xiphos vis-a-vis RTF vs. HTML display
targets? I'm not in a position to render an opinion on that.<br>
<br>
But I can say that module authors like Laurie are stuck: They are
forced to use a least common denominator set of features of OSIS,
being the preferred markup methodology, because the interpretation
of that markup, as rendered into a display window, is not
consistent, cannot be counted upon.<br>
<br>
Laurie:<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:700a5d83-194d-4dbc-a0aa-7a5e6e59221f@email.android.com"
type="cite"> >If we don't have a high level of commonality
then I am concerned that<br>
>we are losing the purpose of having a common "engine"<br>
</blockquote>
David:<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:700a5d83-194d-4dbc-a0aa-7a5e6e59221f@email.android.com"
type="cite"> Well, no not necessarily, the purpose of the engine
is to read the modules and then provide the content in a way
that the front end can meaningfully use for its purpose.</blockquote>
This makes me want to throw things.<br>
<br>
The purpose of the engine is to produce the text according to the
filters which its client, the frontend, has chosen, and from which
that client expects consistency of output result.<br>
<br>
That's all.<br>
<br>
Anything else avoids the question. A frontend's "meaningful use"
is irrelevant if the engine's product is not in line with what the
module author wanted. Cf. Laurie's experience with tables and so
forth. The filters are supposed to produce output from an OSIS
table spec, however that looks in the original markup, into
something that makes sense in a frontend's HTML or RTF or
WhateverElse widget. When those filters don't do that, crud gets
displayed, crud like Laurie found.<br>
<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:700a5d83-194d-4dbc-a0aa-7a5e6e59221f@email.android.com"
type="cite">You can look at it this way, if the engine
determined how frontends should display the text, what would the
point of multiple front ends be? <br>
</blockquote>
Wow, David, can you say "red herring"?<br>
<br>
The reasons for picking a particular frontend have precious little
to do with that. What drives Xiphos users? Historically, for as
long as I've been involved with the code, it's been user
interaction features and visual quality, especially for
user-created and -editable content, which is why Xiphos has user
annotations and editable genbooks and tree-structured bookmarks
and multi-bookmarks and verse highlights and dynamically resizable
images and a bunch of other things. That's what users on the
mailing lists have asked for, so that's what we've produced.<br>
<br>
That the frontends should display the same text in closely the
same way should be axiomatic, and is precisely what Laurie is
looking for. And David whistled right past it. It's not textual
display that differentiates today's frontends, it's their other
features far beyond "can it display text properly?" We haven't
even achieved that level-zero axiom. We should be ashamed.<br>
<br>
Besides this, I believe a hug<i>e, </i><i>HUGE</i> aspect of this
is bound up in an issue that is nearly rejected outright, when
it's given any attention at all: How does The Publisher want it to
look? Do we even bother to ask? If we ask, do we listen to the
answer? Laurie wants OSIS tables to behave a certain way, namely,
according to its own spec. Has anybody taken her thoughts to
heart? Have any filter fixes been done in the name of
accommodating what she perceives as bugs?<br>
<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:700a5d83-194d-4dbc-a0aa-7a5e6e59221f@email.android.com"
type="cite">But until people need the additional features, they
won't be added. Images are a good example, this is very new to
the code, but wasn't put in until someone felt the need. <br>
</blockquote>
Images have been supported in the engine for as long as I've been
around, again about 8 years. This is not new by any reasonable
meaning of the word. By comparison, the XHTML filters are less
than 2 years old and are already in wide use. There has been an
ImageSampler module since long before I was around.<br>
<br>
Laurie:<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:700a5d83-194d-4dbc-a0aa-7a5e6e59221f@email.android.com"
type="cite"> >I do feel that the system / project would
benefit<br>
>from establishing (or publishing/clarifying same) minimum
standards<br>
>for markup functionality<br>
</blockquote>
David:<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:700a5d83-194d-4dbc-a0aa-7a5e6e59221f@email.android.com"
type="cite">This is a laudable goal (with caveats for for the
aforementioned cases where presentation is not visual or doesn't
care about formatting for other reasons). But this is very
difficult to do.<br>
</blockquote>
You might as well have said "we can't fix bugs."<br>
<br>
The fact that Laurie can report that Feature X (such as table
display) doesn't work consistently in OSIS markup as rendered in
all the frontends means that the engines, both C++ and JSword, are
buggy. Mothing more and nothing less. They need to be fixed so
that they do what they're expected to do, so that they behave
according to spec. There <i>is</i> a spec, y'know, a document
that says there are minimum standards for markup functionality,
just as Laurie asked immediately above. Once that's done right,
if any further frontend bugs remain in the resulting output as
displayed, then we in frontend development will have our own bugs
to fix. Until then, it's an engine problem.<br>
<br>
--karl<br>
<br>
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