On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 11:33 AM, Carsten Becker <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> Shameless plug: Look at the HTML code, e.g. of this:
> <http://benung.nfshost.com/examples/txt/xmp_candles.html>. The technique I
> use to align my interlinears relies heavily on CSS though, so the layout
> kind of breaks when you disable the stylesheet.

IMPO this is a fairly good way to display the interlinears. The one thing I
don't like about it, compared to tables, is that it completely breaks
copy-paste. I'm not sure how to get both other than a kludgy method like a
JS/flash clipboard widget.

I think that requiring CSS2 support is something you can long since do.

I *really* don't think JS is the appropriate tool here AT ALL. What you want
is a *server-side* function that takes three coordinated space-delimited
strings and outputs Carsten-style wrapped interlinears. There is no reason
to be making it client-side; all you'd do is totally break utility when JS
is disabled.

In Ruby/Rails it'd be this (I imagine it's just as trivial in PHP):

application_helper.rb:

def interlinear native, segmented, morphemic, gloss
  native, segmented, morphemic = native.split(' '), segmented.split(' '),
morphemic.split(' ')
  raise ArgumentError unless native.length == segmented.length ==
morphemic.length
  text = ''
  (0..native.length).each do |i|
    text += content_tag :div, :class => :interlinear do
      content_tag(:div, native[i], :class => :native) +
      content_tag(:div, segmented[i], :class => :segmented) +
      content_tag(:div, smallcapsify(morphemic[i]), :class => :morphemic)
    end
  end
  content_tag :div, :class => :example do
    text + content_tag(:div, gloss, :class => :gloss)
  end
end

def smallcapsify text
  abbreviations = %w(1SG DAT SUBJ POSS ...)
  abbreviation_regex = Regexp.new('(' + abbreviations.join('|') + ')')
  text.gsub(abbreviation_regex, "<abbr>\0</abbr>")
end

... plus appropriate CSS for classes example, interlinear, native,
segmented, morphemic, and gloss; and for ".morphemic abbr".

It would have to be pre-delimited though. No easy way to automatically
segment text.

- Sai