formatting of glossed examples

[HedvigS]

As I asked people re wiki publishing, Alena pointed out that there is a discrepancy between how the glossed examples are rendered between the github wiki markdown and the clld web app pages per feature, specifically in terms of aligning the forms.

clld web app

Github wiki article

Is that something that is an easy fix or would it be very cumbersome to figure out how to render the alignment on the clld web app?

[xrotwang]

My prefered fix for this would be moving to CLDF Markdown for the feature descriptions - i.e. adding the examples as ExampleTable to the CLDF dataset and only referencing them from the wiki pages. Then, the regular example display of clld apps could be used, e.g. https://apics-online.info/sentences/72-64

[HedvigS]

Hm, okay. Is there a way to do this automagically?

[xrotwang]

Maybe a rough first pass. Manual inspection/correction would almost certainly be necessary.

[HedvigS]

Maybe a rough first pass. Manual inspection/correction would almost certainly be necessary.

I think that could work. A first pass would save a lot of time.

[xrotwang]

@johenglisch do you want to have a go?

[johenglisch]

Yeah, I'll take a look at this

[johenglisch]

I'm a bit out of the loop with how people use the wiki so I might be wrong, but I have trouble seeing how CLDF Markdown would fit in here.

The way I understood it CLDF Markdown relies on a separate rendering step which resolves links into the CLDF data. But separate rendering steps don't really gel well with editable wikis:

• If we put the CLDF Markdown mark-up directly on the wiki, Github will just show a bunch of broken links.
• If we generate the wiki pages from separate files, we would overwrite any manual changes that people added.
• If we disallow manual edits and redirect people to a bunch of ‘source’ files then changing wiki pages becomes more complex and bureaucratic and I'm not sure that's a good idea.

What am I missing?

[xrotwang]

The only viable option is the first one. I.e. examples go into a CLDF ExampleTable and are only referenced in the wiki pages. This assumes that there won't be too much editing of examples in the future. The "just a bunch of broken links" thing can be turned into a feature if the link label - i.e. the part that goes into [...] is used to extract what's essential about an example, or just for any mnemonic hint on what's in the example.

[HedvigS]

If you think it's worth it then sure, but to me it seems a little like overkill.

You are sure there is no way of enabling the kind of github flavoured markdown that works in the wiki with the way the clldf-web app makes the feature pages?

[HedvigS]

We could remake the examples into proper markdown tables? Is that a viable other option?

[xrotwang]

As I said, I think spending any effort on this would only be worth it - from my point of view - if we thereby make the examples available as proper structured data in CLDF. If @johenglisch thinks tweaking the clld app is easy - he can go for it. Rewriting examples into markdown tables seems overkill to me - that would require a lot of editing. If you go that way, make sure to test with one example first. Rendering markdown tables into an HTML page that has all sorts of CSS attached to it might have unintended side effects.

[johenglisch]

There's a lot going on right now, so I just opted to fix the rendering bug on the web app side for now. Unless this really urgent (i.e. must be done this week), I'd say we can revisit this later.

[HedvigS]

There's a lot going on right now, so I just opted to fix the rendering bug on the web app side for now. Unless this really urgent (i.e. must be done this week), I'd say we can revisit this later.

I appreciate you doing all of this. It's not urgent, we're not pushing to web until give the go ahead in relation to paper publication.