One of the sore points from last autumn was a discussion about TEI encoded dictionaries and how poorly they display in absence of good filters - etc. You all remember.
A couple of days ago I played a bit around with CSS, trying to see what it could/would do to a TEI entry. I used "abash" from Easton (I think) The result of a couple of hours work you can see here: www.crosswire.org/~refdoc/private/abash.html Look at the source to compare. Also note the absence of many of the headings in the source TEI. CSS allows to insert text, which is a brilliant tool to render tags with a high level of meaning (vs structure) There are three cheats/caveats in there: 1) I did nothing to make the references work. They don't work. 2) I wrapped everything in HTML and BODY tags to make my browser play nice. 3) I had to delete a couple of lb tags which somehow broke my design. I am sure I could find a way to resolve this without deleting them. As more and more frontends move to fully CSS capable displays I think we should consider to leave engine based filters behind and simply use the XML provided by the engine in a raw state but slam CSS on top of this. The immediate advantages appear to me 1) very simple to code by people who do not know C++ 2) very flexible display - maybe even on the fly accessible to power users of frontends. 3) full semantics of underlying XML exposed which might allow other uses of these. At this stage a filter would still be required to deal with references adequately. I presume a move from CSS to XSL could deal with this too, but I have a lot less clue about XSL and how to use it in a browser setting, so I did not even try. Peter _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel@crosswire.org http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
