An Experiment with Interlinear Glossing to Try Out

Greetings All,

An update on this channel is long overdue.  The most interesting
development since our last communication has probably been an experiment
with interlinear glosses by Richard Ishida that by all appearances looks to
have been highly successful and I would encourage people with an interest
in interlinear text to give it a test drive with their samples of interest
and report any capability gaps.  Please visit Richard's blog post from
March of 2019: http://r12a.github.io/blog/201708.html#20190304

Reviewing the samples that Sean pointed out earlier that year (
http://nltinterlinear.com/Rom.1.1-32/interlinear), I see that they are laid
out with an HTML table when I view the source. From the looks of it, I
believe the could be handled sufficiently by the approach that Richard
devised.  An advantage to using Richard's technique is the automatic line
wrapping when a window is resized, and when text is added or removed.
Reformatting a table similarly would be laborious.

I'll point out a difference in the perspective between the two approaches
that I think is noteworthy.  With a table, rows are defined first and then
columns within them.  With Richard's approach, columns are defined and then
rows within them.  That is, a column created around base text contains the
list of necessary interlinear rows.  I think this makes management and
greatly simplifies the association of the annotation to base text with
respect to the DOM model.  It is also similar to the Ruby annotation model
in this regard (columns contain rows).

I did try out the Interlinear gloss technique with Zaima annotation (
https://w3c.github.io/elreq/zaima/ZaimaInterlinear.html) and came into a
limitation when forming columns around individual letters versus words.
The difficulty reduces to the horizontal alignment of an annotation symbol
above a base symbol.  Positioning controls are lacking (admittedly so is my
CSS skillset) and I would resort to relying heavily on non-breaking
spaces.  The positioning controls are then largely available in the Ruby
markup and styling specification.  I found this to have been a useful
exercise and illuminated the distinction between the word-based and
character-based interlinear annotation use cases.

-Daniel