In Development: Pages to Describe Zaima Chant Requirements

Greetings All,

I had some inspiration recently that many of the challenges of presenting
Zaima chant notation could be handled by layered Ruby markup where the
notation text is elevated in successive layers.  In effect, treating Zaima
as a three dimensional document projected onto a surface.  It worked out
pretty well.  It seems with CSS and JavaScript almost anything is possible
these days.

While the experiment worked, the approach is akin to a "slight of hand"
that was very sensitive to browser versions and had no guarantee of working
long term.  Case in point, when my browser updated (Chrome v60 to v61), it
all fell apart and I had to start over.  In some respects presentation
capability was lost under the upgrade.

The exercise did allow me to think about the broader problem of supporting
the Ge'ez hymnody, beyond just the interlinear notation. Broader still, to
consider HTML support of chant traditions that rely on staffless notation.
I am lead to conclude that the W3C would serve a broad, multi-national and
multilingual community if it took on the problem of addressing interlinear
layout more robustly by considering the use cases from chant literature.

Presentation experiments, use cases, and thoughts on a document model
(general chant and zaima specific extensions) are presented here:

  http://w3c.github.io/elreq/zaima/

I have mostly tested the pages in Chrome 61 and Safari 11 which do pretty
well, your browser window will need to be opened wide for most pages if not
full screen.  The documents change almost daily, but are stable for the
most part now.

There is a lot that can be said about the various aspects of the
experiments and where they could lead, and many questions raised in need of
expert input, but I'll stop for now.  In short, I plan to continue refining
the zaima document model and hope to take up the general problem of
interlinear text layout with interested groups at the W3C.  Any input is
welcomed.

thanks,

-Daniel