OK, we seem to be talking past each other. You are using Lockman and the NASB as your example because of its prevalence all over the web. I'm specifically not talking about Bibles. As I stated in my previous email, most of those have footnotes which start over on every page, even in print. If you get a basic NASB or NIV or other modern translation with just translator's footnotes, all the versions from every publisher I've ever used have footnotes, labeled with letters, that begin anew on every page and ignore verse, chapter and even book boundaries.
I'm talking about general books and commentaries and to that point... On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 11:43 AM, Troy A. Griffitts <scr...@crosswire.org> wrote: > And I still disagree with you that module author wish to retain their own > style (or should want to retain their own style). I hear from module > publisher that they simply want their content presented professionally and > represents their intention for the content. None have ever tried to dictate > to me specific visual attributes they need attached to content. Think of > all the other attributes a print publisher attaches to content: 2 column, > center-row footnotes, page content start and end summary lines at the top. > We write software where these things don't make sense. I would tend to > place footnote labels in this bucket. I understand why others disagree with > me. I want to give us both the ability to display things how we think best. I have about 950 modules (none Bibles) that disagree with your claim. They're from all manner of publishers, but they all come through Wycliffe. True, not all of them will be available for public consumption due to copyright, but those to which Wycliffe is the publishing holder are still potentially going to be released for consumption. When we were evaluating software, and I was getting my first real look at SWORD development we lined up BibleTime and GnomeSword against one another to compare their features - since we were only interested in Linux and this was back in 2005. Key problems they had me tackle when I first got there were: 1) Styling was not being preserved, even though a CSS file was included in the ThML header and that same file styled an HTML file properly - we handled this by using an XSL stylesheet to insert style="blah" tags on every ThML element. Styling was extremely important to them - they nearly abandoned SWORD to develop their own library because they couldn't get SWORD to preserve their styling until they moved to inline inclusion of a style tag. This styling is not preserving print styles, but rather styles that are able to be applied to the content in another display application (Logos/Libronix) - and it is very necessary to proper display of the contents. Some of it is as innocuous as font sizes and weights, others were standardizations of titles (turquoise background, centered and italics on by-lines and the like, borders). Still more of it was very important for display - selection of different fonts for Greek vs Hebrew vs Aramaic displays. OSIS provided no way to specify these things and SWORD refused to support an external stylesheet. So we were forced to use an HTML-based application that had a solid rendering engine with good language support and poorly designed ThML modules with inline style content. This was not a small issue and, at the time, Gnomesword/Xiphos was the only option that had all of this support and possibly BibleTime. 2) Footnote markers were not being preserved in BibleTime, no matter the content type. This was a deal-breaker for them and they insisted on using Gnomesword/Xiphos unless they create a custom patch that allows BibleTime to honor the n=X setting for footnotes. I've documented this before, but you continue to insist that no publishers anywhere care about the display of their modules so long as the content looks right. But I'm telling you - this is not an academic, "What if..." or an "I prefer..." This is a real module creator and SWORD software user who has demanded these features, and is limiting their use to only Xiphos because it remains the only application on Linux which supports both of these "killer features" that they require. So you waving the Lockman example - which has already been conceded on the basis of even print Bibles going by the same motif - is a moot point. At the very least honoring the n=X (and it might be in the on-hover box that it pops up, I dunno, not necessarily on the inline marker) by default and allowing a user the ability to disable them would be behaving "as advertised" on the OSIS label. Claiming to support OSIS and then willfully behaving in a way that the specification claims is not behaved amounts to a bug. We are not following the spec we purport to follow. --Greg _______________________________________________ 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
