On 04/13/2013 09:24 AM, Chris Little wrote:
On 4/12/2013 11:18 AM, John Austin wrote:
On 04/12/2013 07:45 PM, Chris Little wrote:
I've worked with many, many SFM texts, and they often do not follow SFM
rules or play nice in a variety of ways. All of this greatly
complicates
an already serious conversion from SFM to Sword. The proof may in the
the pudding. Simple is sometimes better in the real world. Sure, IBT
could recreate their modules using container elements, but that still
would not provide the reliability or control enjoyed by the existing
modules. I still don't see (beyond theory and arguable semantics) a
good
reason to deny "customers" a sound and working solution.
As a rule, we don't do things incorrectly when we know that they are
wrong beforehand. Indent milestones are arbitrary, ad hoc, bad
engineering practice, and bad markup practice. Generating s as
pretend paragraph indentation is bad (X)HTML and completely inflexible.
(What happens when a content provider wants a half indent? A hanging
indent?) The proposal is a big kludge. We should instead implement the
correct method of generating indented and other paragraph types.
They work perfectly well. They validate against the OSIS schema. They
are good engineering practice because they solve a difficult problem
without negative effects of any kind. We can argue about bad markup etc.
but some grace should be given to an approach that is proven and
perfectly valid, which already exists in practice, and which has solved
a nagging real life problem.
They don't work perfectly well.
In terms of representation, the milestones represent something that
isn't there and should instead be a property of something that actually
is there.
In terms of the formatted output (the (X)HTML), you're emitting
something extremely bad. You want indentation, which is a formatting
matter. To achieve your intended formatting you are corrupting the
character data stream by inserting NBSPs to cause a side effect:
horizontal spacing. If you want to change horizontal position, you
should do so through one of the established methods, not as a side
effect of inserting characters that have different semantics.
Consider this: When you copy & paste text from a front end or webpage,
should the indentation be copied as a bunch of NBSPs? Hopefully you
agree it should not. The NBSPs are noise that has been inserted into the
character stream. (If you try this on the PDF you linked and the
rendering by phpsword, you can see that they behave differently when you
copy text and paste it into a word processor or text editor. That's
because the PDF does formatting correctly using PDF layout methods, but
phpsword relies on a side effect.)
The issue is not how the indent is implemented by the engine. It is the
acceptance of these translator dictated elements as valid milestone
content in the OSIS file, and Sword recognizing and implementing these
indents as indents.
Actually, the line I copied above is the whole "paragraph"- it is not a
multi-line anything. See
http://ibt.org.ru/en/text.htm?m=UZVL&l=Ruth.1.15&g=0 for the real
location of this example. These two words are not a paragraph in
anyone's book, and to call this a paragraph, as you insist that I must
do to use Sword, is in my book: "arbitrary, ad hoc, bad engineering
practice, and bad markup practice", and just wrong. Let publishers
decide what it is and what it will look like- users of Sword will all be
glad!
Abstractly, it's multi-line. Some (most?) of these paragraphs are
multi-line. Even your two word example would be multi-line with a
sufficiently narrow column. These paragraphs break in exactly the same
way as other paragraphs.
I still can't see the argument for these not being paragraphs. I would
accept that they could be a different type of paragraph from the type
that starts at the start of a sentence, but they are clearly paragraphs.
Paragraphs with hanging indents are markedly more different than these,
but they're still paragraphs.
I still can't see the argument for requiring that everyone call these
questionable instances paragraphs, and require that they must always be
marked up as such. Why not give the publisher the option of calling it a
paragraph if they consider it a paragraph, or else calling it an indent
if they think it will be more correctly understood as an indent? For
instance, many people consider that a paragraph should be followed by a
blank line (between paragraphs). What if I desire that this indented
line in my translation should never have a blank line after it, and that
it is an actual indent which is the content I intend to add- in order to
make my text more understandable? Then I should be able to call it an
indent. I would be very correct in doing so. Future readers of my OSIS
file would also unambiguously understand my intentions as well.
--Chris
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